The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 1

Raekwon
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt.II

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II was legendary before it was real. Raekwon told people that the album was done back in 2006, when Busta Rhymes was still executive producing it for Aftermath. After 2007 came and went without a trace of it, OB4CL2 joined the ever-growing list of rap album ghost stories, alongside Detox and Swift & Changeable and, at the time, Sir Luscious Leftfoot. It was a shrunken head nailed to Dr. Dre’s office door, warning everyone against getting involved with him. It was another lost masterpiece by a late-period artist—one that we all secretly knew wouId’ve been a disappointment, had it ever seen the light of day. It meant more as a totem—or, worse, a punch line—than as an actual, possible collection of music. It was a specter; a fable; a death knell. Except, of course, that it wasn’t.

The real story (or, at least, the version of it I choose to believe) behind the release of OB4CL2 is much less sensational, and much more exciting. It’s this: Raekwon simply wanted to make a classic. “I didn’t want to rush it. I wasn’t in need of money when I made this album. I wanted to actually piece this album correctly,” he told Hip Hop Official in July 2009, right around the time the album got an official release date and tracklist after years of stalling out. Those might seem like routine concerns at face value, but they’re backed up by five years of digging his heels in; working and reworking the vision of the album; wrangling an A-list team of producers, then demanding that they bring fire; ensuring that the guest spots were lean and powerful; and tightening each song to a point where it could not be improved. In other words, Rae spent five years doing everything that every artist should do for an album, but few actually do. And Rae’s work pays off in his album’s unmatched depth, magnitude, and nuance. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II is not just a record; it’s the Great American Novel.

Would OB4CL2 have received the same attention if it had taken another name? Probably not. But the reverse is also true: Raekwon chose to invoke the name of his solo debut because he needed the material to live up to his best efforts. It was a pragmatic way to hold himself accountable to his own legacy. His audience would demand that it live up to its title—so much that the reputation of the original Only Built 4 Cuban Linx was probably even at stake—therefore Raekwon would have to make damn sure that it did. That helps account for OB4CL2’s anachronistic quality. It feels vital, but not necessarily timely. That’s because its lineage has less to do with the market, and more to do with Rae digging in the same holes he’s been digging in forever, and the result is a piece of work that stands outside of time. Wu-Tang is a brand, sure, but in order to capitalize on its commercial value, Rae had to find all kinds of new possibilities in the old blueprint.

So, OB4CL2 is also a genre work, in the way that Motherless Brooklyn or Brick is each a work of noir: It’s steeped in the Wu-Tang legacy, but pushes at the edges of that tradition at every opportunity. “Cold Outside,” for example, is analogous to the original Cuban Linx’s “Rainy Dayz”—they’re both mournful, weather-referencing songs that hold roughly the same place in each album’s starting line-up. “Rainy Dayz” was itself an analog to Enter the Wu-Tang’s “Can It Be All So Simple.” But, if you take look at that trilogy’s evolution of sound, you get a sense of two decades’ progression. “Can It Be All So Simple” was scarcely more than a loping bass line, Gladys Knight sample, and some muffled snares. On “Rainy Dayz,” the low end takes a back seat while the violins from Michael Jackson’s version of “Ain’t No Sunshine” dominate the song; Blue Raspberry sings the hook live; the sound of rain is heard throughout the back half of the song; and high-pitched electronic squeals frequently interrupt the music. More than just a wistful track, it’s a dizzying experience. But even “Rainy Dayz” is sleek as hell compared to “Cold Outside.”

“Cold Outside” is buoyed by a similar vocal as the other cuts, this time by a dude named Suga Bang Bang, whose most notorious appearance on record before this was on the hook for Iron Flag’s “In the Hood.” Compared to the spare composition of “Can It Be So Simple,” or the hallucinatory “Rainy Dayz,” the production on “Cold Weather” is a cacophonous mess—the low end is nearly absent; the tempo surges in arbitrary places; and the song is driven by something that sounds like a Casio keyboard on a horn setting, playing off-rhythm. The progression from “Can It All Be So Simple” to “Rainy Dayz” to “Cold Outside” is a progression from simplicity to complexity, not unlike Shakespeare’s progression from Romeo & Juliet to Hamlet to King Lear. It’s no coincidence it to Rae and his collaborators seven times as long to get from B to C than it did to get from A to B.

In order for Cuban Linx II to even begin to work as a piece, it had to be at least partly a kaleidoscope of the Wu’s history. On that, it delivers expertly, from the familiar narration bookending the album to a Rae, Ghost & Meth collaboration so good it inspired a full album follow-up to the requisite Ol’ Dirty Bastard tribute. On a lesser album, “Ason Jones” would be a toss away end track. On OB4CL2, it’s strong enough to buoy the second half of the album with little more than two verses by Rae and a couple of ODB interview excerpts. Rae paints Ol’ Dirty warmly, as a man who cooked, cleaned, and smelled of Balantine—the types of things that seem antithetical to Dirt Dogg’s whole image—and assigns the track one of the album’s three coveted Dilla beats. Giving it such care, Rae energizes a track that could have merely been a rote gesture. Over and over, OB4CL2 sees Rae reigniting Wu ephemera with new fire.

On the flip side, elements of Cuban Linx II constantly jar expectations of a Wu album. “House of Flying Daggers” showcases one of Dilla’s best posthumous beats, and the excerpt from The Four Tops’ version of “Eleanor Rigby” sets up for Scram Jones’ “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” sample on the album closer. Raekwon famously spoke out against RZA’s production on Wu-Tang’s 2007 album, 8 Diagrams. In an interview with Miss Info, he called the RZA “a hip-hop hippie,” saying, “he’s trying to do too much of this guitar shit, like he’s got a guitar on his fucking back.” But OB4CL2 cannibalizes 8 Diagrams’ “guitar shit” into stuff like “House of Flying Daggers,” Scram Jones’ “Kiss the Ring,” and The Alchemist’s Styx-biting “Surgical Gloves”—all of which gives the album a glammy edge that’s out of step with prior Wu-releases.

There are solid guest spots by Beanie Sigel, Slick Rick, Busta Rhymes, Jadakiss and Styles P—all of whom could’ve been chosen for the album based purely on the timbre of their voices. In particular, Jada and Beanie come out of the gates on their respective tracks by challenging the rhythm and cadence of the whole album. Jadakiss growls his way through the opening bars of “Broken Safety” with the kind of braggadocio that the Wu usually sublimates, twisting gripes about the down economy into lines like, “Funerals are still affordable/ I’m better than all of you.” On Beanie Sigel’s verse, the rigid structure of his rhymes sticks out on album of stream-of-consciousness raps. In contrast to Rae’s loose free-association, Beanie takes four bars to starkly emulate the metronome of an incarcerated mind: “My days gettin’ shorter/ My nights gettin’ longer/ My cell gettin’ smaller/ My son gettin’ taller.”

Whereas the tension that defined the original Cuban Linx grew out of Raekwon and his supporting cast’s gangster role-playing, the tension that riddles its sequel is almost entirely artistic. The pull between the Wu-Tang legacy and Raekwon’s forward thinking is mirrored on a small scale by, say, the tug between Dr. Dre and Mark Batson’s commercial-leaning, piano-driven beat on “Catalina” and the way Rae’s verses unfurl spasmodically, with the action turning every couple of seconds. In order to be successful, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II had to play servant to two masters, the past and the future, and when “the past” means two classic albums and countless expectations from legions of fans, of course it’s going to take five years for Raekwon to get it right. The only way he could have pulled it off was by doing exactly what he did—attending closely to every sound, every word.

-Martin Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 2

Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Ah, the number two album in a consensus based list. It's never a hotly felt personal choice, it's rarely a chance-taking piece of contemporania, and it's usually higher than other albums than it would be if a list were mathematically qualitative. As has been carved out in the past, as will get worse as age takes its toll, it usually music that has been listened to again and again, songs that will eventually lose even their most personal value. The lyrics become meaningless babbling, the sound itself loses all demand on attention, and when it fades away--like when it stops showing up on a shuffled playlist, or when the hard copy is forgotten in a family member's truck--it's gone forever. It's 2010, and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix--one of the brightest bursts of pop of 2009--already shows a bit of wear.

When M83 decided to create an homage to John Hughes, they did so with one hand firmly placed alongside the shoulder of nostalgia, declaring, as they did throughout, this was a loveable past, but it was still history. Phoenix, another band that's spent as much time mastering technology as any of 2009's dance-pop trend-chasers, doesn't bring that sort of nodding vision to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. For these Frenchmen--and yes, it is a rule to mention their country of origin at some point--the breeze and the snap is the point, the tinge of filling the Christopher Cross void is the goal, and it's the baggy jean generation that they're going after.

Phoenix didn't defy expectations, they didn't even attempt to sidestep them. Doubling down on the experience they'd all but perfected on It's Never Been Like That, they slid through them, like some kind of Hollywood producer's ideal autistic genius--the "why" can't find purchase, it's only the "what" can be answered. It's worm-music, burrowing it's way through the ear and directly to the lungs, eagerly taking apart the early morning presents, sparkling eyes and naked curiosity abounding. It's the music that overly disclipined children might make, complete with youthful stabs at what Youtube might mislabel "arty", wrapped around goals that are refreshingly old school--can we be catchy! can we be poppy!--and its lyrics are across-the-board generic mystery poems. (Hardcore academics could use "Lasso" as some kind of lodestone for convoluted discussions of public sexuality as performative social interactions, but Phoenix probably had a more "I've got soul, but i'm not a soldier" sort of catch-phrasing in mind.) They wanted to play, so they did, and they somehow managed to capture the experience intact, pretension and goofiness together.

These sorts of albums eventually get replaced in their rotation, usually by the latest edition of whatever it is that comes along to supplant them. They're albums of immediacy, often less valuable to those who spend their time exploring the past--after all, perfect dance songs exist, only a fool would pretend that everything creative is laced with the ambition of dominance. Music, thankfully, can't ever really win. It's too much of a moving target, after all. In the short term--the year, the month, the moment--it can only end up in a position of default supremacy, those lucky moments when the right song meets up with the right time. Last year? Phoenix pulled it off more often than not. Hell even Cadillac thought so.

(Still, "to reignite the soul?" Jeeeezus.)

-Tucker Stone, 2010

The Top 50 Songs of 2009: # 25-1

This year, in order to determine the Top 50 songs of the year, we reached out to The Factual Opinion’s extended family, which included Noah Berlatsky, Matthew J. Brady, David Brothers, Philip Dhingra, Sarah Engelman, Andre Harris, Tim O’Neil, Zeb L. West, Sean Witzke, and Josh Woodbeck, in addition to Tucker and I. The results have a sliiiightly more populist bent than they typically do, but they also represent a wide cross-section of what was happening in music this year, from indie rock to pop to rap to even jazz and dubstep.

Previously:  The Top 50 Songs of 2009: #50-26

25. Yeasayer – “Tightrope”

Just about every morning for the past month I’ve been getting the chorus of Yeasayer’s Tightrope stuck in my head while I shower. The song is layered with sleigh bells, hand claps, something that sounds like cooing chickens and desperate, quivering vocals that come together and create a delicate and powerful ballad about regret and moving on. I’ve heard three very different versions of Tightrope so far, involving everything from kazoos, rattling keys, a melodica and a highly staccato Chris Keating (but always keeping the haunting “ahh-ahh”s); and they’re all my favorite. –Sarah Engelman

24. Jay-Z – “Run This Town (Feat. Rihanna & Kanye West)”

I'm not sure what this song is about exactly (something about being famous, maybe; the most quotable lyric is Kanye's "She got an ass that'll swallow up a G-string, and on top (uh) two bee stings"), but man, is it entertainingly listenable and put together impeccably. It's the kind of thing that just keeps piling nice wordplay on top of a great beat, with pauses for a forcefully wailing Rihanna to go on about running this town tonight. The song will keep running through my head, that's for sure. –Matthew J. Brady

23. Sleigh Bells – “Crown on the Ground”

I'd be a damned liar if I said I heard these guys before Pitchfork did - so I won't even try. Still and all: so fucking what? You'd have to be an idiot not to know these guys are up to something good. I can't even really describe what is so awesome about this song: it sounds like Swizz Beats remixed by Merzbow, with that awesome chick from Beach House on top. (OK, there's maybe a slight resemblance to Crystal Castles, except for the fact that these guys aren't antisocial crust punks.) I don't even know if the raw, bleeding-red lo-fi sound is intentional or just a product of the fact that this is an unreleased demo which we probably aren't supposed to have. These guys don't even have a label yet and already they're already bigger than Jesus. That's the music biz in 2009, but I hope they don't suffer the whole dastardly Behind the Music fame and disaster cycle before they get the chance to release their debut on Interscope in 2011. (Joke! They're probably not going to sign to Interscope.) But put all your sorries in a satchel for the present: just listen to the way the chorus crests with the sound of a woman having an orgasm on top of a Casio keyboard, and tell me that's not the future of music. –Tim O’Neil

22. Massive Attack – “Pray For Rain (Feat. Tunde Adebimpe)”

I think I like this song so much because of how I was introduced to The Doors. I hadn't heard them until high school, when a friend sat me down with one of their greatest hits discs and we listened to it all the way through. Something about the sequencing on that album reminds me of the phases Pray for Rain goes through, almost as if it were a Doors album compressed down into six minutes. The haunting voice that's just a little subdued, the pounding drum and echoing bells, and that bit when the songs elements slowly fall out of the track a couple minutes in right before the voice comes back, leading the charge as the music comes back in, but different-- this is really, really interesting stuff to listen to. It feels like a story. –David Brothers

21. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – “Failure”

Sometimes I have manic panic attacks where I feel giddy and confused, a little light headed and slightly lost. That’s how the first half of A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s Failure makes me feel, and like a dirty scab picker I like it. The schizophrenic jumble of noises sounds like a mad fun house with vocals and synthesizers swimming and swirling around chaotic drums and angry guitar strums. The second half of the song is like my calm and quiet boyfriend coming in to tell me it’s time to start winding down and getting ready for bed so I have some chance of getting to sleep. I fight and fight and fight for a little while and eventually succumb to the tinkling piano and zzzz… –Sarah Engelman

20. Beach House – “Norway”

Beach House misspelled this song for fun (she sings "no way" for sure). This song isn't about Norway at all! Why did they call it that? Maybe they think songs are valued by their emotional effectiveness on the audience not their actual meaning I dont know. I mean everything hits everyone differently right? So its not the way your hit but how hard. So while this song Is about love and loss and hurt and all that, its really the way that its expressed that makes it incredible. How those almost whispered "ah ah ahs" and shimmery synths morph into this droning extended organ note and back again. How that steady synthetic drum beat lulls you into its dreamy surf like presence. Speaking of presence; Victoria's performance here sounds like the cries of a fallen angel. Her voice croons, screams, yelps and soars like some unbound force. The performance itself has a meaning that no one else in the world can recreate. And thats what counts in the end: The captured moment. –Andre Harris

19. Gui Boratto – “No Turning Back”

No matter how many times I play this song, I never see it coming, it never fails to just stop me as the track is slowly overtaken by sequenced guitar distortion. It's never abrasive, it's not an assault on the listener. It's a blossoming, geometrical expansion of sound that collapses in onself and expands out multiple times over the song's nearly 8 minutes. It's fucking gorgeous too - mostly in its subtlety and control, the song really only making minor changes to maximum effect. The voice finally coming in at three minutes, completely muted - a real voice made to sound like a sample. When the decade switched over there was a lot of talk about how turning an EQ knob couldn't have the same effect as a live band contorting it's groove - but here Boratto is doing just that and the effect is devastating. –Sean Witzke

18. Camera Obscura – “My Maudlin Career”

"My Maudlin Career" is huge, wall-of-sound pop, but its real power doesn't come from its vastness, it comes from the casual manner it just drifts out. Tracyanne Campbell's melancholy voice is just pretty, like all the 60s pop singers whose boyfriends had left them, but so much better than Leslie goddamn Gore, etc. Her voice is like gauze, the words kind of fall apart when you look at them too close, it's really more an execution of emotion than a work of poetry, it's so aching and warm. "This maudlin career has come to an end, I don't want to be sad again" equates the relationship with an awful job, but with automatic inescapable sadness. It's about not being up for something like this again. One of the best lines in a song this year is "He kisses me on the forehead and his kisses give me concussions". –Sean Witzke

17. Animal Collective – “My Girls”

Of course Merriweather Post Pavillion was Animal Collective’s commercial breakthrough—it bundled all of the band’s eccentricities into classic rock-structured songs. By that token, “My Girls” was their “Stairway to Heaven”: an immaculately executed slow-burner, a spot-on power-ballad for its time, and a poetic diatribe about materialism, played with utter sincerity. This is the new standard for epic, AOR songwriting, with the internet replacing FM radio as its conduit. If that means we’ll all be sick of “My Girls” in a few years, so be it. –Martin Brown

16. Crystal Antlers – “Andrew”

“Andrew” would be a great dive bar jukebox song, perfect for a surly and sulky late night slow dance. Singer Johnny Bell will plead for your forgiveness while you sway to the organ chords, and make your whiskey-breath’d apology. The grumbley lyrics, though not always intelligible, can be understood more through their earnestness, on a simple rhyme scheme that culminates in a last-chance appeal for relief from last-call loneliness, “don’t let me die alone.” –Zeb L. West

15. Beirut – “My Wife, Lost in the Wild”

This is good for slipping into a daydreaming trance. The repetitive instrumentation sets a hypnotic rhythm which eases you into equally hypnotic, unintelligible vocals. You may find yourself in a little trance which, by the end of the song, will make you press repeat, again and again. –Philip Dhingra

14. DJ Quik & Kurupt – “9x Outta 10”

The harshest, most inhumanly detached, raw beat last year was weirdly enough a Portishead record, so this year the universe realigns itself and the most raw thing is "9x Outta 10". The beat is a stuttering mechanical punch in the face that pretty much just keeps happening for 3 minutes. It keeps punching you in the face, no break. A voice is diced up for an unintelligible flourish. But it's pretty much just a beat and Kurupt going off. Talking about... something. Who cares? It's at least partially about how bad-ass Kurupt and Quik are (and yes, they are). This shit is proof that sound means a million times more than content - how he says it over what he's saying, but what he's saying is great too - "Don't talk to me no more about no motherfucking money" is the kind of shit someone needed to say to rap in '09, and it wasn't some whiney backpacker asshole who said it, it was a member of the goddamn Dogg Pound. –Sean Witzke

13. Atlas Sound – “Quick Canal (Feat. Laetitia Sadier)”

This isn't gonna be too hard. I love this guy. I've listened to his stuff so much my ears should be bleeding. Three cheers for Bradford Cox! He's my bff forever. I listened to this song thirty times before it even had lyrics. Id listen everyday before I went to work. A ten minute masterpiece of beautiful noise and hypnotic drum beats. I listened to it whenever i was bored because time just flew by when it played. This song is like smoking cigarettes except not gross but beautiful, always there for you when you need a friend. this song makes you feel like your floating in space on a huge dance floor. For some reason your all by yourself but you dont notice cause your having too much fun. Its like a beautiful tapestry weaving itself together before your eyes...IN SPACE! Its like breathing the freshest air around. Its a pure joy ride. I guess I dont need to say anymore right? Enjoy –Andre Harris

12. Raekwon – “House Of Flying Daggers (Feat. Inspectah Deck A.K.A Rollie Fingers, Ghostface Killah A.K.A Tony Starks & Method Man A.K.A Johnny Blaze)”

THIS REVEIW HAS BEEN RATED F FOR FUNKY ASS LANGUAGE.

NEWSFLASH! WU tang is STILL, after twenty years homie, nothing to fuck with at all....like not even close though seriously. Man remember that album 36 chambers? That mother fucker stank it was so good! Remember Clan in da front? Yeah ya do man its one of the best rap songs ever! This song sounds like that song as a cyborg. Except that cyborg is a zombie...and high...and dancing like hes in thriller! And I ask you my dear fellows have you heard these dudes rhyme lately? Its crippling shit. They break your ankles with rhymes. Let me bust out some examples to make myself feel good: "Dont fuck around I will spill on you and kill you on the streets boo" "Our guns are chunky" "Cry Syria bury me in Africa" "You can see me on the street on a yatch" and so on and so forth the shit is bananas. I listen to this song my heart starts beatin, I feel like if I dont bop my head somethin bad will happen, but who cares? Pure rap bliss and one of the best songs of the year. WU TANG are still killah bees so you best recognize. –Andre Harris

11. Bon Iver – “Blood Bank”

Bon Iver’s Blood Bank feels like a warm, lonely, beautiful moment filled with great longing. The lyrics are simple and intimate poetry, touching on themes of family, home, secrets, love and honor. The harmonies and guitars come together to make it feel like a memory from long ago, yet it feels like it’s being created just for me each time I listen. And as sappy as this review is, Blood Bank manages to carry a respectable weight. Justin Vernon may be self conscious ex-jazz band geek who sulkily locks himself in a cabin for months after a rough break up to write folksy indie-rock love songs, but I don’t get the sense that I’m listening to a sissy whine about his life. –Sarah Engelman

10. Burial & Four Tet – “Moth”

Burial and Four Tet, two songs on a record, no fanfare or pre-release mentions, you know the frill. If you're at all like me you had it coming in from rapidshare about ten seconds after you found out it existed, and you felt a little disappointed. One song was a Steve Reich thing with dubstep drums, the other was a lush downbeat track that actually sounded like the two artists collaborating, both songs were 9 minutes long. The one that actually sounded like Burial and Four Tet on equal grounds, turns out that one's a grower. Actually maybe it's more than that, it's a really amazing collaboration all restrained beat and shimmering fuzz, creating lush expanses with only stereophonic chiming and keyboard notes, a pair of female voices just far enough away for us not to hear them completely. Turns out it’s the best thing either of them has ever done. –Sean Witzke

9. Teengirl Fantasy – “Portofino”

One of those rare instrumental songs that you can loop forever. There's approximately four layers to this, with the dreamy twinkle being the longest-lasting and most indelible part of the song. I get strange visuals while listening to this, like psychedelic Disney elephants in a marching band. Perhaps this is because when I first heard this song, it was on Portofino's MySpace, which had an animated background of twinkling stars and a looping profile pic of Jean-Claude Van Damme in fluorescent spandex, clapping his hands like a dork at a dance-off. –Philip Dhingra

8. Grizzly Bear – “Two Weeks”

Do you know who dislikes this song? No one. Like Outkast’s “Hey Ya” unified the entire early-decade hip-hop bell curve, this song takes all the indie-pop fans, outliers included, and gives them all something to love. The pretty instrumentation and vocal harmonies smack of a fighting-weight Paul McCartney composition. The vaguely earnest feel fits squarely in the “do we really believe in irony for irony’s sake” zeitgeist without over doing it and offending those who don’t like to be told what to feel. The lyrics (and the high notes) are eerily reminiscent of Andre 3000’s “it’s a slog sometimes, but let’s stay together” triumph. You can make out to this song. You can teach children’s ballet to this song. You can cook with your parents to this song. You can play this song in a really bored bar and watch the positive recognition spread. It’s a veritable Swiss-Army knife. We owe this song some gratitude. –Josh Woodbeck

7. Passion Pit – “Little Secrets”

Songs like this are magic dust. Sprinkle em on a booty and it just starts shakin'! Just a pinch and suddenly Grandma’s wrinkles ain’t saggin' no more. Some voodoo combination of generous beats that drop right when you need em, big snare hits that command you to rock, a bed of synth chords that are just elevating you until you’re hit by a children’s chorus that makes you feel like you’re at the fattest Sesame Street block party ever! Even Mr. Hooper’s ghost is pumping his fist, shouting “higher and higher and higher!” So maybe the lyrics are vague to the point of subjectivity… (Drugs? Sex? Who knows?) Who cares! I’m over here high-fivin’ Mr. Snuffleupagus! –Zeb L. West

6. Das Racist – “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (Wallpaper Remix)”

Listen to the original version of Das Racist’s “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” and you immediately notice how lackluster it is next to the Wallpaper remix. Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez obviously know they’re onto something funny, as they shout out their lines with the brio and twang of a couple of dudes harassing the F-train shuttle bus driver at 5 am on a rainy Saturday morning, but it’s not until Wallpaper adds some Public Enemy-worthy siren horns and sets the vocals slightly off-beat that they really nail the joke. At that point, it’s like lightning in a bottle: ridiculously awesome, but what the fuck do you do with it? –Martin Brown

5. Big Boi – “Shine Blockas (Feat. Gucci Mane)”

Back in the early years of this misbegotten decade CW had OutKast pegged as straight invincible. Then after the bloom faded from Speakerboxxx / The Love Below, our heroes were suddenly quite vincible indeed, bumbling around movie theaters and subsequently getting lost in rumors of perpetually imminent solo albums and improbable label limbo. But even if CW could not have foreseen just how quickly things fell apart, it also couldn't have predicted how totally Big Boi would eclipse his partner in critical estimation. In hindsight it's easy to see why: Andre had ambition, yes, but no focus and no discipline. Seriously, when was the last time you listened to The Love Below? If he ever drops a solo joint expect it to feature sampled whale sounds and XTC covers, maybe a Terence Trent D'Arby cameo. Big Boi may not have written "Hey Ya," but he's got something better: "Shine Blockas" rolls like classic mid-90s ATL bounce, but the thick soul samples swoon and soar like Girl Talk. Somehow it manages to be both a player's anthem and a future disco crossover - a Cato Institute white-paper on old-fashioned family values as elucidated by Gucci Mane, and a post-Dilla, post-Kanye rocket to Mars. Perhaps if the damn album ever materializes it might actually be good enough to convince me that it hasn't all been a terrible let-down since Aquemini. Leave all that pop shit behind, forget Ms Jackson and all those Grammies (but I'll keep B.O.B., kthx) - just go back to putting that bump up in our eyes. To that effect, this is a good start. –Tim O’Neil

4. The Roots – “How I Got Over”

"How I Got Over" opens with Black Thought ad-libbing and goes right into the typical conscious rap chorus- street life, we gotta do better, "someone has to care"-type stuff. And then, when Thought's verse should begin, we get... Black Thought singing. His voice is raspy, like paper on paper, and sad, which makes it a perfect fit for a song about being down and then standing up. He's tired, he's burnt out, but life is still straight. By the end of the song, Black Thought has rapped for maybe thirty seconds, sang for the rest of the song's three minutes and thirty seconds running time, and you don't even notice at all. Black Thought is consistently underrated as a lyricist, and maybe he's even more flexible than we thought on the mic. This feels natural. –David Brothers

3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Hysteric”

Wait a sec, YOU thought that YOU loathed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? The dumb name? The horribleness of having to play “Maps” again on Rock Band? The buzz that just can’t be explained and that no one seems to buy? ME TOO! And yet, this song makes me reconsider the whole catalogue. It’s that spot on. The hooks are polished like vintage ditties from the Strokes. The superficially sappy lyrics rise to the material instead of making you wonder what the hell any of this has to do with anything. The fuzzing and buzzing sound like something Johnny Greenwood would mix into a Santogold single. It’s incredible. It’s actually… cool. If you attached this song to a commercial, I’d be hard pressed not to buy whatever you were selling. Look, I’m sorry to slam the Yeah Yeah Yeahs so hard while including them in a best of the year list, but come on, I’m as shocked as you are. –Josh Woodbeck

2. Phoenix – “1901”

Phoenix sure seems like everybody's favorite indie band this year, or at least the one that people who don't pay much attention to the music scene can identify, and listening to this song makes it obvious why; they've got a great combination of catchily melodic singing, a nice, simple guitar riff, and some electronic background sounds that add an ethereal mood to the typical hipster stuff about love and relationships and whatnot. Not bad for some skinny French guys; they're sure to be the toast of Pitchfork for quite some time to come. –Matthew J. Brady

1. Dirty Projectors – “Stillness is the Move”

“Stillness is the Move” is a song that’s constantly at war with itself. Dirty Projectors build conflict right into that title, with motion and stillness opposing one another like some sort of cheeseball yin/yang reference. Radio-friendly sensibility tugs on one end of the song; band leader Dave Longstreth’s artsy flourishes pull on the other. The tension between the two forces produces grating hip-hop beats, minor-key melisma, and doo-wop harmonies that could have been lifted from Gregorian chants. A Malian guitar lick churns into a Timbaland-worthy R&B loop. Amber Coffman tosses off platitudes like she’s channeling Mariah Carey—except that she’s also contemplating getting a job as a waitress—while Angel Deradoorian’s voice snakes in, out and around them. Longstreth’s composition consistently opposes high concept and pop culture, as if those ideas were two bloodthirsty bulldogs staring one another down in the street, and he ends up with the most mysterious and likable song of the year. –Martin Brown

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 3

Dirty Projectors
Bitte Orca

2009 turned out to be a watershed year for indie rock, defined by what critic Jeff Weiss calls “the three-headed Hydra of Hype that was The Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, and Grizzly Bear.” Each of those bands supported their artistic breakthroughs with a certain amount of commercial success. Merriweather Post Pavilion and Veckatimest made their debuts on Billboard at #13 and #8, respectively; Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca peaked at a respectable #65. All three albums landed on Pitchfork’s Top 200 of the decade, representing the only selections from 2009 on there; all of them even placed well within the highest 30%. It stands to reason that the triumvirate will come to signify late-00’s rock music more than any other albums of recent years. Yet, as much as the timing of the parallel surges in the bands’ popularity ties them together, it’s astonishing just how different the albums are. Surely there are people out there who value all three in equal measure, but I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a strong preference among them.

In broad strokes: Veckatimest is folk-based NPR-bait that practically renders last year’s beloved Fleet Foxes debut obsolete. Merriweather is (arguably) the high point of an eight-album career, channeling the band’s avant-garde, psychedelic, and electronic predilections into a mostly accessible Beach Boys tribute. Bitte Orca, on the other hand, is a spikier proposition altogether. Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective earn their commercial successes with albums that contain staggering songwriting, but rarely offer anything in the way of genuine surprise—especially if you’re already familiar with the two bands’ catalogues. Dirty Projectors, on the other hand, stun at every turn, offering Afrobeat-tinged R&B, power ballads, and Zeppelin-style guitar workouts, all within an accessible framework.  Their work is revelatory to both the band and indie rock as a whole. The difference is built right into the album names. Veckatimest and Merriweather Post Pavilion take their names from pastoral settings—an island near Martha’s Vineyard and an outdoor concert venue within a planned community in Maryland. Bitte Orca is a mishmash of German and Latin that, near as I can tell, roughly translates to “You’re Welcome, Whale.” I suppose it’s pretty obvious where my preference lies.

Prior to releasing 2007’s Rise Above, a recreation of Black Flag’s Damaged made purely from memory, the last album of Dirty Projectors’ new material was 2005’s The Getty Address, a concept album that claimed to be an opera about post-9/11 America. Its protagonist: Don Henley. Until Bitte Orca, Dirty Projectors’ band leader and principal song writer Dave Longstreth frequently couched his songs in high concepts. Here, he directs a limitless creative intelligence toward pop craftsmanship, drawing on wide ranging influences in order to cobble them together in a distinctly novel sound. Talking Heads, Ali Farka Touré, Timbaland, Steve Reich, Aretha Franklin, and plenty of other artists have a direct impact on Longstreth’s remarkably taut compositions, giving Bitte Orca the virtue of sounding like an album where anything could happen at any time without actually being an album where anything could happen at any time. At the same time, it’s much more than an intellectual exercise. Longstreth’s songs are loose, dance-friendly, and—when he rattles off lines like “What hits the spot more than Gatorade?/You and me, baby/Hittin’ the spot all night”—genuinely funny. More than anything else, they’re forward-thinking. While Veckatimest and Merriweather Post Pavilion will likely come to symbolize the sound of 2009 in rock, Bitte Orca stands a chance of helping to define a whole new era.

-Martin Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 4

DOOM
Born Like This

How long do you think it took Daniel Dumile to record Born Like This? Six months? A couple of weeks? The full three and a half years since his last LP? “Angelz” has been kicking around since 2006, when it leaked in anticipation of a full-length Ghostface/Doom collaboration that has yet to surface, and “Lightworks” co-opts a classic Dilla track from the same year’s Donuts. Then again, there’s an element of Born Like This that feels like DOOM’s in the studio banging out tracks like Krusty the Clown recording copy for a talking doll: “All right, you poindexters, let’s get this right. One: ‘Hey, hey, kids, it’s Doooom.’ Two: ‘Hey, hey, here comes Dan Stuckey.’ Again. ‘Hey, hey, here comes Dan Stuckey.’ ‘Dan Stuckey.’ Three: [Evil Laugh]. Budda-bing, budda-boom, I’m done. Learn from a professional, kid.”

Judged by traditional rock album standards, Born Like This is a shambles. There’s little unifying structure—both over the course of the album, and within the songs themselves. There are almost no choruses, and plenty of songs last only the length of one verse. There’s not a whole lot to grab onto, besides DOOM’s wordplay and some subtly compelling production by Jake One, Madlib, Dilla and DOOM himself. Yet, DOOM is clearly a master lyricist, whose punch lines, internal rhymes, archaic slang and pop culture references are, without hyperbole, among the most rewarding in the history of rap music. What makes this his best effort since 1999’s Operation Doomsday, is that it’s simply a vehicle for the dude’s raps. Unlike Dumile’s many other decade high points—Viktor Vaughn’s Venomous Villain, King Geedorah’s Take Me to Your Leader, Madvillain’s Madvillainy, and Dangerdoom’s The Mouse and the Mask, respectively—there’s no satirical concept, split focus, dizzying production or cartoon characters to get in the way of the show. DOOM’s rhymes may be elaborately constructed, or they may be tossed off. Either way, Born Like This showcases a brain operating on wavelength most of us can’t even pretend to understand.

The album’s lean running time and measured guest spots edge it toward classic status. DOOM has the advantage of 20 years’ experience in the rap game, but even most veterans haven’t mastered the art of brevity. Why say in three verses what you can accomplish in one? Usually, producers have the thankless job of making rappers sound good. With Born Like This, it’s reversed. On “Rap Ambush,” DOOM’s restraint keeps Jake One’s beat from wearing out its welcome; whereas, his performance on “Gazillion Ear” calls attention to every shift in Dilla’s masterful production. It would likewise be tempting to hold the production accountable for the album’s few weak lyrical moments. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the homophobic screed in “Batty Boys” grew out of DOOM’s fascination with his own production’s homoerotic superhero samples. Even then, DOOM’s compulsion when getting wrapped up in his own themes is another mark of his talent. Whether the album is a collection of hastily composed rhymes, or merely constructed to sound like it, the joy in listening to DOOM rap on Born Like This is hearing him chase his own ideas down the rabbit hole.

-Martin Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 5

Martyn
Great Lengths

"No matter which pieces of vinyl you buy, what equipment you play them on or how much you crank up the bass, the true low-end experience can never be appreciated except over a proper club sound system. It pulses through your body, prickles the skin, presses upon your face, confounds sensations of distance and depth. The feeling of bass is a crucial component of virtually all contemporary dance music."

-Derek Walmsley

While Walmsley's description of the origins of dubstep in The Wire Primers leaves one with a hunger for dubstep, but it also walks one right up to a difficult question: if Walmsley's right, and dubstep is a style of music that requires a "proper club sound system" to truly experience, then what is it we're getting at home? If this entire genre is so tied into the low-end experience, can the genre survive the individual curation of musical culture, the world of self-determined mixtapes and 500 gigs of choice? Artists like Burial, Kode9, Digital Mystikz, the artists that inspired Martyn's transition from drum 'n bass to dubstep--they can sound great on headphones, but it's a sound removed, a sound moved away from the experience that bore it forth.

That problem, in itself, doesn't seemed to have concerned Martyn. Fashioning a dubstep album with the same level of audience concern that he used as a successful club dj, he's brought in all the bells and whistles of two decades of electronic music. Tracks that start off with a standard Benga riddim give way to weirdly danceable club music; atmospheric exercises (ala Burial) arrive as breathing room, depart as drum 'n bass style beats. That's not to say that Great Lengths is any less of a low-end experience, but that Martyn uses it to build a frame, then inserts the crowdpleasing bits for excitement. But the success of Great Lengths, the way in which its more easily digestible sound found purchase with those who found previous dubstep classics too sterile, has brought about a icy response from a few loyalists--"it isn't pure", for the one. It's an understandable attitude--Burial's sound may require investment, but it's far from sterile--but its an attitude that denies Martyn's obvious charm: he's making music that extends beyond the arenas that most dubstep works best in, either the club or the pricey headphones.

There's a moment at the beginning of Great Lengths where Martyn unexpectedly changes things up in a fashion worthy of exaggerated hyperbole: it's the moment when a computer voice drawls out the numbers 3-0-2-4. That moment, when Martyn chooses to name-check his own label, Death Row Records style--that's the demarcation point for the whole fucking genre. It's the moment when dubstep stopped relying on Spaceape for the personality, the moment when a dubstep artist quit zeroing in on the perfection of moment and mood, when one of these ghostly figures pranced about a bit without losing the mystique and vagaries of a music style trying to make its way out of the club without losing a bit of its club feel. Martyn's skill wasn't that he created something as uniquely personal as what dubstep had done before, but that he took what it had done best--the core worship of a sea of low-end atmosphere--and used it as a foundation to re-create what electronic music is supposed to be in the first place: the music of contemporary momentum. More than anything else, what Great Lengths captured wasn't the sound of a genre dying, but the sound of a genre finishing its research into what drum n' bass and house had left to atrophy. In Burial, dubstep found its perfection. Under Martyn, it began it's re-emersion into the general experience it had abandoned. From here, it said. 

Where it begins.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 6

UGK
UGK 4 Life

UGK's renaissance is one that's been more implied than real, with a decent portion of their best work finding appreciation in weird, non-hip-hop related quarters. (Besides grime, Texas based hip-hop is the second most likely form of hip-hop to find large scale coverage in Wire, a magazine whose primary interests are most often tied into things like improv noise and avant garde tone poems.) And while UGK spent 2007 capitalizing on the inroads that Ridin' Dirty had paved for them by releasing the definitive album of their career, the same year also saw Bun B burying his partner, following Pimp C's cough syrup related death. Like most rappers, Pimp had left behind a decent amount of unreleased recordings, most of which were at some level prepared for what became UGK 4 Life.

UGK 4 Life has the same aspects of Frankenstein construction that all posthumous albums do: disconnect, a surplus of guest stars (ranging from Akon, Too Short & Raheem DaVaughan), but it's still got a firm grasp over what UGK always did best. Bun B, with his rambly, back-straightening delivery of lines like "Chukka deuce. Holla at your boy", following up Pimp C's whispering of hissy-fit insults--this wasn't a duo of men who sounded anything like one another, it was a couple of guys who really liked working with one another, men who shared similar interests: sex, drugs & money, and the parties that combinations of those three would create. And while there's a name check towards Robert Crumb on "Hard As Hell", that sort of quippy aside is there as icing, a fringe benefit for the hardcore who might have questioned if there's anything for them to be found on a song where Akon and Pimp C strangle the syllabic content in a song about having a really fantastic erection. Besides the content and delivery, the other thing that always made up UGK's work remains consistent: the bass is loud, and it's just a little slower than you're used to. The tempo forces a sleepy, lazy quality upon E-40, B-Legit, 8 Ball & MJG's guest appearances on "Used to Be", burying a predictable guitar sample behind the vocals and beats, daring the vocalists: you better bring something, or else this song is going to be about a crappy Aerosmith cover band. And while some of those lyricists fail, it's not wholly surprising. After all, Pimp C uses the album's closer to point out that your career can't be called as such if you're back on couches after a platinum hit. (E-40? We're still trying to make that dog hunt?)

At the bottom of it, Bun B's pre-release warning about that album--that it was going to be a "weird" one--isn't totally accurate. Sure, some of the guest spots are wasted--only god could explain the appeal of Raheem DaVaughan--and the rock guitar samples are store bought crap, but neither of those mistakes hurt the sound enough to make it weird. No, the only argument that credits strangeness would be this: an album, constructed out of the leave behinds of a man who died two years ago, a duo, destroyed forever by that same death--it shouldn't sound this good, it shouldn't be this striking, it shouldn't work as well as it does. Songs about a distaste for hirsute genitals, songs about erect penises and bubbling volcanoes of man milk, they should send one knocking over the tea in the race to claim that Pimp's talents were wasted on half-ass obscenities.

But they don't. They can't. For all its brevity, for all its kitschy transitions, for all its bravado and bombast, UGK 4 Life ends up being the best epitaph that the group could've delivered, the coda that a decade of overblown doomsday poetry has failed to understand.

This shit doesn't mean anything if it ain't fun.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 7

Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion

ha ha old people.

ha ha hipsters.

ha ha the internet.

ha ha mean people.

Conveniently located in the Baltimore/Washington corridor off Route 29 in Columbia, Maryland, Merriweather is nestled within the 40 preserved acres known as Symphony Woods. The natural, outdoor concert setting is one that simply can't be matched.

Outside? Who goes outside anymore? The woods? Who goes to the woods anymore? Tap water? Who drinks tap water anymore? Hand jobs? Who gets hand jobs anymore? CBS? Who watches CBS anymore?

---

Here's a picture of a cat.

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I drove home crying after I lost my virginity. A couple of weeks later, she was scooping up this guy's semen off the seat of his truck and shoving it inside her, because she figured he wouldn't break it off with her if she got pregnant. Years later, I saw her sitting in the hatchback trunk of a Ford Escort in a Wal-Mart parking lot. We made eye contact as I drove away.

I was wearing 300 dollar jeans that a homosexual man gave to me. (He bought lots of clothes that he planned on wearing when he had lost enough weight to fit into them. Every few months, he would give the unworn clothes away and buy new ones.)

I remember thinking that was sort of fair, me in new clothes, her looking sad in a trunk, and then being surprised that I was still bitter.

That's when I knew that I could like Animal Collective a whole lot. Bunches, even.

-Tucker Stone, 2009