In the interest of being less of a deadbeat blogger, I’ve been wanting to transition to shorter, more frequent posts (the first being the necessary condition of the second) here on Pop Tones. Today’s post will not mark the beginning of that trend. It’s hard for me to believe I’ve never written at length on U2, a band whose music I’ve had a long, complicated relationship with over the past two decades, and I’m hesitant to do so now, as anything I write here is bound to be less than definitive.
But onward. In many ways, the arc of U2’s career has been defined by the long process of the band’s musical ability catching up to its artistic ambitions. U2 came to prominence during the 1980s and everything they’ve done since has inevitably been judged according to the dubious aesthetics of that decade, for many of the same reasons that a lot of people persist in thinking of Bob Dylan as some kind of protest singer on the basis of a handful of songs he wrote when he was 21 or something. Rock and roll, and pop culture in general, has always fixated on the young and the new (everyone knows this). Still, there’s something to be said for the value of mature-period works as such; the same auteurist impulse that can trace the development of formal ideas and sensibility, as well as a honing of craftsmanship, through the career of a film director can obviously be applied to musicians as well. In any event, as the new U2 album No Line on the Horizon attests, notwithstanding the claims of either ’80s nostalgics or classic-rock fascists who never owned the group to begin with, they weren’t half the band then that they are now.
U2’s 12th album happily finds producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois back on board, along with Steve Lillywhite. No disrespect to Lillywhite, a fine producer who’s made a number of great records with the band over the years, but the presence of Lanois and especially Eno should be mandatory on every U2 album; they’re as essential to the band’s sound as George Martin was to the Beatles’. It’s no coincidence that the five U2 albums produced by the duo—The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991), Zooropa (1993), and All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000)—are the band’s five best.
Make it six. While the Lillywhite-produced How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) had several first-rate songs, the album wound up being somewhat less than the sum of its parts. More specifically, it was lacking in the spiritual overtones that have helped define all of U2’s best work—whether through their presence or pointed absence. But with the exception of the poignant “Miracle Drug”—and despite the inclusion of a song called “Yahweh”—the album never quite registered on that level.
The best thing about Atomic Bomb was the band’s newfound comfort with its own grandiosity, a sense of ease that also pervades the new album. Following the electro-grooving title track, which unlike epic U2 openers like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “Beautiful Day” is content to merely put the ball in play, we arrive at the dance-club hymn “Magnificent,” the first of three consecutive knockout songs that define the spiritual and emotional contours of the album. “I was born to sing for you/I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up,” Bono sings, injecting biblical language (“It was a joyful noise”) into an already elevated love song before taking us to church in the chorus (“You and I will magnify/The Magnificent”), which soars to the heavens in classic U2 style, climaxing the first time around with an ecstatic “MAG-NIF-i-cent!” from Bono. It’s a beautifully constructed song, the chorus withheld until after the second bridge, and the Eno-Lanois production encompasses sounds from seemingly every phase of U2’s career—digitally delayed guitars, techno blips and bleeps, programming merging imperceptibly with Larry Mullen’s drums—all fused into a seamless whole. And then it occurs to me that Bono’s been trying to write this song for almost 30 years, at least since 1981’s October, and it’s only now he’s gotten to a place where he could pull it off. As a more secular frequent Eno collaborator once put it, it takes a lot of time to push away the nonsense.
Next comes “Moment of Surrender,” a seven-minute techno-gospel epic about finding the road to Damascus at the ATM that once again finds Bono shutting out the world in a flash of divine revelation (“I did not notice the passers-by/And they did not notice me”). Beginning with a gospel bark and hitting the chorus in a falsetto, the singer shows his range here. Like most of the best songs on No Line on the Horizon, “Moment of Surrender“ develops patiently, in no hurry to get where it’s going, the rhythm tracks gurgling forward as if the band were suspended underwater.
On Atomic Bomb, Bono did some backsliding on his pledge to keep his political activism separate from U2’s music and the album’s lyrics were afflicted with a touch of tepid positivism as a result. On Horizon, the personal largely trumps the political. “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations/Not right now,” Bono growls on the punchy “Get on Your Boots,” although he’s changed his mind by the album-closing “Cedars of Lebanon,” a meditative first-person exploration of the psyche of a jaded foreign correspondent in the Middle East. But even this doesn’t quite qualify as a political song—the journalist’s reflections on his craft make him sound a lot like a songwriter (“The worst of us are a long drawn-out confession/The best of us are geniuses of compression”), and the overall vibe is reminiscent of the ghostly “Ain’t Talkin,” which closed out Dylan’s most recent studio album, Modern Times.
Musically restless, No Line on the Horizon covers a lot of ground. Less immediate than the band’s past two albums, Horizon is closer in overall effect to transitional works like The Unforgettable Fire than to big-statement albums like The Joshua Tree. The Lillywhite-produced “Breathe” finds Bono free-associating à la Patti Smith, scrambling to be heard (“Let me in the sound! Let me in the sound!” he insists at a couple other points on Horizon) over an atypically monstrous riff from Edge, while the atmospheric “FEZ—Being Born” is the only song to explicitly reference the band’s brief stint in Morocco. (Although rumor has it that No Line on the Horizon has a twin, a more meditative, experimental, possibly Sufi-influenced album to surface late this year or early in 2010. Stay tuned.)
But the alert reader has no doubt already noticed that I never got around to the last of those three knockout songs. A mere week after No Line on the Horizon’s official release date, I’m ready to declare “Unknown Caller” one of the half-dozen or so best U2 tracks of all time. Eno makes his presence felt here, as on “Moment of Surrender,” with musical ideas that go all the way back to his 1975 classic Another Green World. His synthesizer arrangement and the song’s rhythmic, robotic vocals blend harmoniously with a classic Edge guitar line to create a song that’s both classically U2 and unlike anything else in the band’s catalog, the thrill of which is exponentially enhanced by the knowledge that this particular combination of sounds, ideas, and musical forms was literally decades in the making. Bono’s lyrics again sketch a portrait of a man in existential crisis (“I had driven to the scene of the accident/And I sat there waiting for me”), before giving way to the majestic chorus: “Restart and reboot yourself/You’re free to go,” chant what sound like the digitally distorted voices of Edge, Eno, and Lanois, their short, clipped phrasings crashing into the song like text messages from God (“Hear me/ Cease to speak that I may speak”) in an inspired fusion of sound and sense. The masterful production climaxes with an unlikely French horn and an unlikelier Edge guitar solo. “Unknown Caller” plays like a gloriously expansive response to Radiohead’s paean to techno-alienation “Fitter Happier,” a joyous dispatch from someone who’s been there and done that and somehow come out the other side.
10 March 2009
22 February 2009
The Show Must Go On
Writing about last year’s Oscars in this space, I dared to suggest that the Academy’s sensibilities were finally getting a bit more contemporary. Not only was there no traditional Oscar bait among the nominees but the inclusion of the Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece There Will Be Blood in the Best Picture race felt like a real breakthrough. I even liked the song that won. Well, either I spoke too soon or 2008 was just a bad year for the voters, because this time around the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has conjured up their worst Best Picture lineup since at least 2004 and possibly even the dreaded 2000, still the worst year in the history of the Oscars, if not of Hollywood.
So I'm feeling a bit less enthusiastic than usual this year, owing to a lackluster group of nominees—not to mention the fact that the world appears to be coming to an end. Indeed, under the dire circumstances, tonight’s stone-cold, lead-pipe lock for the big prize could hardly feel less appropriate: Slumdog Millionaire, a British movie set in India, puts a glossy, contemporary-looking spin on an old-fashioned, bordering on cornball, story. It’s safe, bland, feelgood fluff—nothing special but certainly not the worst imaginable Oscar winner. Indeed, I’d take Slumdog in a heartbeat over three of its four rivals. Quickly: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an overlong, pointless bore; Frost/Nixon is fatuous nonsense; and The Reader…well, let’s just say that even had the movie not been a moral abomination, it still would have sucked.
Granted, 2008 was a somewhat below-average year for American movies, but in a year with viable contenders like WALL*E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, and even The Dark Knight, this lineup is pretty inexcusable. At least Slumdog looks and sounds like it was made this century, making it a less retrogressive potential Best Picture winner than Benjamin Button or—perish the thought—The Reader. Hopefully this is one of those two steps forward, one step back things, but I guess time will tell. Most of the heat tonight is in the Best Actor category, a virtual tossup between Sean Penn in the title role of Gus Van Sant’s Milk—the only Best Picture nominee I really like, although it wasn’t even the best film by its own director in 2008—and Mickey Rourke, of all people, as an aging wrestler.
But the two Hollywood movies that defined the year are nowhere to be found on the Academy’s shortlist: WALL*E and its evil twin, The Dark Knight. I wasn’t a huge fan of Christopher Nolan’s brooding and incoherent Batman movie. The editing is a mess; I defy anyone to explain what’s actually happening during the action scenes, which mostly boil down to a meaningless mishmash of cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And there’s the fact that the ending utterly contradicts the view of human nature that’s informed the movie’s first two-plus hours. But still, The Dark Knight may go down in history as the last film of the Bush era, and it’s elevated somewhat by Heath Ledger’s deranged take on the Joker. I’m not particularly thrilled about the whole posthumous Oscar idea, which promises to be a major buzzkill, but at least the performance deserves it. Hopefully the producers will get Supporting Actor out of the way early.
WALL*E, on the other hand, deserves to be taking home the Best Picture statue tonight. Released in the dog days of a seemingly never-ending presidential campaign, Pixar’s robot tale felt like a fresh breeze from the future, an advance payment on hope and change and all that intangible stuff that’s necessary but not sufficient to fix our country’s problems. WALL*E scans as a sophisticated response to one of my all-time favorite films, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; just as Kubrick’s film ends with a vision of the human race transcending its physical and spiritual limitations in a blinding flash of starlight, WALL*E brings it all back down to Earth, closing with humble, human-scaled images of rebuilding and renewal. It was the perfect film for a year of daring to start over and dream it all up again. Now we just need Obama to fix the banking system.
Best Picture
I don’t see any chance of an upset here. Titanic was the last winner that felt this locked-in.
Will win: Slumdog Millionaire
Should win: Milk
Director
David Fincher gets a long overdue nomination, albeit for one of his lesser films, and I’m glad to see Gus Van Sant in the field. I was a big fan of Danny Boyle’s 1996 breakthrough Trainspotting, and he’s gone on to an interesting, if somewhat uneven, career.
W: Danny Boyle, Slumdog
S: Gus Van Sant, Milk
Actor
This is probably the major category that the Academy most frequently gets right, and this year stands to be no exception, with the two best male performances of the year going toe-to-toe. Penn utterly disappears into Harvey Milk, playing the role without a hint of self-consciousness, but Rourke’s performance is truly a once-in-a-lifetime collision of actor and character that’s just riveting. It’s a tight race that may come down to whether voters think it’s too soon to give a second Oscar to the 48-year-old Penn, who won five years ago in this category for Mystic River. Considering that Tom Hanks won two in a row before he was even 40, I say no. And between the Brokeback Mountain embarrassment a few years back still and last fall's Prop 8 debacle, Milk has to win something big, and this is its best shot.
W: Sean Penn, Milk
S: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Actress
This should go to Kate Winslet, who’s on her sixth nomination and still looking for a win, even though she should have been nominated for Revolutionary Road instead (not a great movie, but likely to be mistaken for Citizen Kane by comparison with The Reader). Meryl Streep could win for a role as a change-resistant nun in Doubt, but I found her a tad hammy, and I suspect the Academy will wait for another year to give her a third Oscar. I didn’t love any of these performances; aside from WALL*E failing to land a Best Picture nod, the biggest disappointment of the nominations this year was the exclusion of Sally Hawkins for her buoyant performance in Mike Leigh's fine Happy-Go-Lucky. I guess I’ll take Melissa Leo’s naturalistic turn as a hard-bitten mom in the otherwise forgettable Frozen River over Anne Hathaway’s neurotic poor little rich girl in Jonathan Demme’s excruciating Rachel Getting Married.
W: Kate Winslet, The Reader
S: Melissa Leo, Frozen River
Supporting Actor
It's unfortunate this has turned into the Heath Ledger Memorial Award because this is a terrific batch of nominees, top to bottom. Most people think this is a lock for Ledger and it probably is, but I can’t help but think that many of those notoriously status-conscious Academy members would consider it such a waste of an Oscar...
W: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
S: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Supporting Actress
Penélope Cruz is the nominal frontrunner for her scenery-chewing performance in Woody Allen’s dreadful Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but I’m feeling an upset here.
W: Viola Davis, Doubt
S: Amy Adams, Doubt
Screenplay, Original
W: Milk
S: WALL*E
Screenplay, Adapted
W: Slumdog
S: Doubt
Animated Feature
W: WALL*E
S: WALL*E
Documentary Feature
W: Man on Wire
S: Man on Wire
Foreign Language Film
W: Waltz With Bashir
S: The Class
Cinematography
W: Slumdog
S: The Dark Knight
Art Direction
W: Benjamin Button
S: Revolutionary Road
Editing
W: Slumdog
S: Milk
Visual Effects
W: Benjamin Button
S: Iron Man
Costume Design
W: The Duchess
S: Milk
Makeup
W: Benjamin Button
S: The Dark Knight
Sound Mixing
W: The Dark Knight
S: WALL*E
Sound Editing
W: WALL*E
S: WALL*E
Original Score
W: Slumdog
S: Slumdog
Original Song
W: “Down to Earth,” WALL*E
S: “Down to Earth,” WALL*E
Animated Short
W: La Maison en Petits Cubes
Live Action Short
W: Toyland
Documentary Short
W: The Conscience of Nhem En
So I'm feeling a bit less enthusiastic than usual this year, owing to a lackluster group of nominees—not to mention the fact that the world appears to be coming to an end. Indeed, under the dire circumstances, tonight’s stone-cold, lead-pipe lock for the big prize could hardly feel less appropriate: Slumdog Millionaire, a British movie set in India, puts a glossy, contemporary-looking spin on an old-fashioned, bordering on cornball, story. It’s safe, bland, feelgood fluff—nothing special but certainly not the worst imaginable Oscar winner. Indeed, I’d take Slumdog in a heartbeat over three of its four rivals. Quickly: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an overlong, pointless bore; Frost/Nixon is fatuous nonsense; and The Reader…well, let’s just say that even had the movie not been a moral abomination, it still would have sucked.
Granted, 2008 was a somewhat below-average year for American movies, but in a year with viable contenders like WALL*E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, and even The Dark Knight, this lineup is pretty inexcusable. At least Slumdog looks and sounds like it was made this century, making it a less retrogressive potential Best Picture winner than Benjamin Button or—perish the thought—The Reader. Hopefully this is one of those two steps forward, one step back things, but I guess time will tell. Most of the heat tonight is in the Best Actor category, a virtual tossup between Sean Penn in the title role of Gus Van Sant’s Milk—the only Best Picture nominee I really like, although it wasn’t even the best film by its own director in 2008—and Mickey Rourke, of all people, as an aging wrestler.
But the two Hollywood movies that defined the year are nowhere to be found on the Academy’s shortlist: WALL*E and its evil twin, The Dark Knight. I wasn’t a huge fan of Christopher Nolan’s brooding and incoherent Batman movie. The editing is a mess; I defy anyone to explain what’s actually happening during the action scenes, which mostly boil down to a meaningless mishmash of cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And there’s the fact that the ending utterly contradicts the view of human nature that’s informed the movie’s first two-plus hours. But still, The Dark Knight may go down in history as the last film of the Bush era, and it’s elevated somewhat by Heath Ledger’s deranged take on the Joker. I’m not particularly thrilled about the whole posthumous Oscar idea, which promises to be a major buzzkill, but at least the performance deserves it. Hopefully the producers will get Supporting Actor out of the way early.
WALL*E, on the other hand, deserves to be taking home the Best Picture statue tonight. Released in the dog days of a seemingly never-ending presidential campaign, Pixar’s robot tale felt like a fresh breeze from the future, an advance payment on hope and change and all that intangible stuff that’s necessary but not sufficient to fix our country’s problems. WALL*E scans as a sophisticated response to one of my all-time favorite films, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; just as Kubrick’s film ends with a vision of the human race transcending its physical and spiritual limitations in a blinding flash of starlight, WALL*E brings it all back down to Earth, closing with humble, human-scaled images of rebuilding and renewal. It was the perfect film for a year of daring to start over and dream it all up again. Now we just need Obama to fix the banking system.
Best Picture
I don’t see any chance of an upset here. Titanic was the last winner that felt this locked-in.
Will win: Slumdog Millionaire
Should win: Milk
Director
David Fincher gets a long overdue nomination, albeit for one of his lesser films, and I’m glad to see Gus Van Sant in the field. I was a big fan of Danny Boyle’s 1996 breakthrough Trainspotting, and he’s gone on to an interesting, if somewhat uneven, career.
W: Danny Boyle, Slumdog
S: Gus Van Sant, Milk
Actor
This is probably the major category that the Academy most frequently gets right, and this year stands to be no exception, with the two best male performances of the year going toe-to-toe. Penn utterly disappears into Harvey Milk, playing the role without a hint of self-consciousness, but Rourke’s performance is truly a once-in-a-lifetime collision of actor and character that’s just riveting. It’s a tight race that may come down to whether voters think it’s too soon to give a second Oscar to the 48-year-old Penn, who won five years ago in this category for Mystic River. Considering that Tom Hanks won two in a row before he was even 40, I say no. And between the Brokeback Mountain embarrassment a few years back still and last fall's Prop 8 debacle, Milk has to win something big, and this is its best shot.
W: Sean Penn, Milk
S: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Actress
This should go to Kate Winslet, who’s on her sixth nomination and still looking for a win, even though she should have been nominated for Revolutionary Road instead (not a great movie, but likely to be mistaken for Citizen Kane by comparison with The Reader). Meryl Streep could win for a role as a change-resistant nun in Doubt, but I found her a tad hammy, and I suspect the Academy will wait for another year to give her a third Oscar. I didn’t love any of these performances; aside from WALL*E failing to land a Best Picture nod, the biggest disappointment of the nominations this year was the exclusion of Sally Hawkins for her buoyant performance in Mike Leigh's fine Happy-Go-Lucky. I guess I’ll take Melissa Leo’s naturalistic turn as a hard-bitten mom in the otherwise forgettable Frozen River over Anne Hathaway’s neurotic poor little rich girl in Jonathan Demme’s excruciating Rachel Getting Married.
W: Kate Winslet, The Reader
S: Melissa Leo, Frozen River
Supporting Actor
It's unfortunate this has turned into the Heath Ledger Memorial Award because this is a terrific batch of nominees, top to bottom. Most people think this is a lock for Ledger and it probably is, but I can’t help but think that many of those notoriously status-conscious Academy members would consider it such a waste of an Oscar...
W: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
S: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Supporting Actress
Penélope Cruz is the nominal frontrunner for her scenery-chewing performance in Woody Allen’s dreadful Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but I’m feeling an upset here.
W: Viola Davis, Doubt
S: Amy Adams, Doubt
Screenplay, Original
W: Milk
S: WALL*E
Screenplay, Adapted
W: Slumdog
S: Doubt
Animated Feature
W: WALL*E
S: WALL*E
Documentary Feature
W: Man on Wire
S: Man on Wire
Foreign Language Film
W: Waltz With Bashir
S: The Class
Cinematography
W: Slumdog
S: The Dark Knight
Art Direction
W: Benjamin Button
S: Revolutionary Road
Editing
W: Slumdog
S: Milk
Visual Effects
W: Benjamin Button
S: Iron Man
Costume Design
W: The Duchess
S: Milk
Makeup
W: Benjamin Button
S: The Dark Knight
Sound Mixing
W: The Dark Knight
S: WALL*E
Sound Editing
W: WALL*E
S: WALL*E
Original Score
W: Slumdog
S: Slumdog
Original Song
W: “Down to Earth,” WALL*E
S: “Down to Earth,” WALL*E
Animated Short
W: La Maison en Petits Cubes
Live Action Short
W: Toyland
Documentary Short
W: The Conscience of Nhem En
16 February 2009
Best Music of 2008
At long last, my list of the Top 10 albums of 2008. After weeks of scrounging through blogs, MySpace, and other year-end lists in a desperate attempt to fill out the last couple slots, I’m now confident in saying this was a subpar year. For whatever reasons, it seems that the odd-numbered years have been better than the even ones lately. Hopefully form will hold in 2009. Still, while there was no Kala or Late Registration last year, we did get five albums that I’ll probably still be listening to in 2013. Indeed, the first five on the list could have been in almost any order, and for the first time in several years, the No. 1 spot was in play right down to the wire. But in the end, pure sound narrowly trumped high concept.
1. Portishead—Third
When I heard that Portishead was releasing its first album of new material in more than a decade, I was skeptical, even faintly annoyed. Generally when bands stay away for longer than five years, they’re best advised to pack it in entirely (you will find very few exceptions to this rule in the rock era). But Third is no throwback to the trip-hop days of the mid-’90s, but rather a thorough reinvention, combining the band’s moody lounge pop and fractured beats with a bold psychedelic-rock bent, evoking the likes of Syd Barrett (“Small”) and the Silver Apples (“We Carry On”). And singer Beth Gibbons outdoes her mid-'90s self: her haunting, haunted vocals wade tentatively through “Deep Water” and quaver majestically on “Magic Doors” without ever striking a false emotional chord. The result is the band’s best album to date and this year's improbable No. 1.
(“The Rip” “Machine Gun”)
2. Kanye West—808s and Heartbreak
Given Kanye’s prolific rate of production over the past five years, it’s hardly surprising that the obligatory Difficult Third Album arrives one release late. This dark, death-haunted opus provoked some truly idiotic reviews—with a few honorable exceptions, the critical establishment really missed the boat. Musically, 808s moves away from hip-hop to further explore the synth-pop influences that surfaced on Graduation (to the point of including a Tears for Fears cover). Rap yields to Auto-Tuned singing in what amounts to an album-length version of John Lennon’s “My Mummy’s Dead.” A few songs here work better conceptually than musically, but the six-track stretch beginning with the melodically nimble “Heartless” and ending with the gently despairing “Street Lights” was the best 25 minutes of music I heard all year.
(“Amazing” “Love Lockdown”)
3. The Bug—London Zoo
The best album yet to emerge from England’s dubstep scene is not the work of some unknown young producer, but the latest from veteran English writer-musician Kevin Martin, who’s recorded with various collaborators under various monikers including Experimental Audio Research, Ice, Techno Animal, and, um, God. Employing a wide range of vocal talent, from the suitably combative Warrior Queen to the deep-voiced Ricky Ranking, London Zoo is further proof—as if more were needed—that the musical and aesthetic legacy of dub remains far from exhausted.
(“Poison Dart” “Too Much Pain”)
4. Drive-By Truckers—Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
Following the 2006 misfire A Blessing and a Curse, Patterson Hood & Co. return to form and then some (see "The Righteous Path," posted August 9). Never formal innovators, these Alabaman disciples of Lynyrd Skynyrd are only as good as their songwriting, and by my count this album’s got only one dud out of 19 songs. Not too shabby.
(“The Righteous Path” “Bob”)
5. Fleet Foxes—Fleet Foxes
A new band featuring young white guys with guitars that I don’t hate. That in itself is a rare-enough thing these days, but the Fleet Foxes did far better, combining strands of American musical history ranging from Brian Wilson to Appalachian folk songs, and in the process proving there’s still a place for musical virtuosity in the mostly moribund world of indie rock.
(“White Winter Hymnal” “Blue Ridge Mountains”)
6. Lil Wayne—Tha Carter III/The Leak EP
I was half expecting this album to be a disappointment, given its oft-postponed release date and the accompanying mountains of hype, but Wayne largely delivers on his latest major-label outing, scoring with conventional hip-hop tracks like “Got Money” (featuring T-Pain) and proving he can go deep and soulful when he chooses, as on the Katrina-inspired “Tie My Hands” (with Robin Thicke). Personally, I prefer the looser Weezy of his mixtape work, but the all-star roster of producers and guest vocalists on Tha Carter III does at least guarantee some musical variety even as it also guarantees a somewhat disjointed listen. Of the two songs I dislike, one was a No. 1 hit single. I am perversely proud of this. And don’t forget about The Leak EP, where the sonics finally take a backseat to Wayne’s zingers: “I graduated from hungry and made it to greedy,” he boasts on “Gossip,” still keeping it real.
(“A Milli” “Tie My Hands”)
7. Kaiser Chiefs—Off With Their Heads
With producer Mark Ronson on hand to give the Kaisers’ music a shapeliness and sonic unity missing from previous efforts, the third album from these Britpoppers is easily their best. The songwriting is sharper as well, particularly on the single “Never Miss a Beat.” There should definitely be more anti-youth-culture anthems.
(“Never Miss a Beat” “Can’t Say What I Mean”)
8. Deerhunter—Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
The music of my youth, reprocessed and spat back at me.
(“Nothing Ever Happened” “Dot Gain”)
9. DJ/Rupture—Uproot
With Josh Davis apparently having succumbed entirely to his hip-hop roots and the Avalanches on a decade-long hiatus, there have been far fewer first-rate sample-based albums this decade than I would’ve predicted 10 years ago. This mix album from Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) touches on an unusual variety of styles and moods, even for its genre. Supposedly his 2004 Special Gunpowder is even better. I intend to find out.
(“Plays John Cassavetes Pt. 2” “Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)”)
10. Erykah Badu—New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
I’ll just come right out and say that this doesn’t make the list in an average year, but the always game Badu takes some chances here, with a few standout songs, including two produced by the incomparable Madlib, mingling with the album’s solid but conventional R&B tracks, of which there are many.
(“Soldier” “The Healer/Hip Hop”)
Top 5 songs not on those albums
1. Gang Gang Dance—“House Jam”
2. Hercules and Love Affair—“Hercules Theme”
Dig it.
3. Lindstrøm—“Where You Go I Go Too”
Twenty-nine blissful minutes of Norwegian techno from the man responsible for the year's best album cover.
4. Four Tet—“Swimmer”
5. Hercules and Love Affair—“Blind”
Finally, an Antony Hegarty vocal on a song I actually like.
1. Portishead—Third
When I heard that Portishead was releasing its first album of new material in more than a decade, I was skeptical, even faintly annoyed. Generally when bands stay away for longer than five years, they’re best advised to pack it in entirely (you will find very few exceptions to this rule in the rock era). But Third is no throwback to the trip-hop days of the mid-’90s, but rather a thorough reinvention, combining the band’s moody lounge pop and fractured beats with a bold psychedelic-rock bent, evoking the likes of Syd Barrett (“Small”) and the Silver Apples (“We Carry On”). And singer Beth Gibbons outdoes her mid-'90s self: her haunting, haunted vocals wade tentatively through “Deep Water” and quaver majestically on “Magic Doors” without ever striking a false emotional chord. The result is the band’s best album to date and this year's improbable No. 1.
(“The Rip” “Machine Gun”)
2. Kanye West—808s and Heartbreak
Given Kanye’s prolific rate of production over the past five years, it’s hardly surprising that the obligatory Difficult Third Album arrives one release late. This dark, death-haunted opus provoked some truly idiotic reviews—with a few honorable exceptions, the critical establishment really missed the boat. Musically, 808s moves away from hip-hop to further explore the synth-pop influences that surfaced on Graduation (to the point of including a Tears for Fears cover). Rap yields to Auto-Tuned singing in what amounts to an album-length version of John Lennon’s “My Mummy’s Dead.” A few songs here work better conceptually than musically, but the six-track stretch beginning with the melodically nimble “Heartless” and ending with the gently despairing “Street Lights” was the best 25 minutes of music I heard all year.
(“Amazing” “Love Lockdown”)
3. The Bug—London Zoo
The best album yet to emerge from England’s dubstep scene is not the work of some unknown young producer, but the latest from veteran English writer-musician Kevin Martin, who’s recorded with various collaborators under various monikers including Experimental Audio Research, Ice, Techno Animal, and, um, God. Employing a wide range of vocal talent, from the suitably combative Warrior Queen to the deep-voiced Ricky Ranking, London Zoo is further proof—as if more were needed—that the musical and aesthetic legacy of dub remains far from exhausted.
(“Poison Dart” “Too Much Pain”)
4. Drive-By Truckers—Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
Following the 2006 misfire A Blessing and a Curse, Patterson Hood & Co. return to form and then some (see "The Righteous Path," posted August 9). Never formal innovators, these Alabaman disciples of Lynyrd Skynyrd are only as good as their songwriting, and by my count this album’s got only one dud out of 19 songs. Not too shabby.
(“The Righteous Path” “Bob”)
5. Fleet Foxes—Fleet Foxes
A new band featuring young white guys with guitars that I don’t hate. That in itself is a rare-enough thing these days, but the Fleet Foxes did far better, combining strands of American musical history ranging from Brian Wilson to Appalachian folk songs, and in the process proving there’s still a place for musical virtuosity in the mostly moribund world of indie rock.
(“White Winter Hymnal” “Blue Ridge Mountains”)
6. Lil Wayne—Tha Carter III/The Leak EP
I was half expecting this album to be a disappointment, given its oft-postponed release date and the accompanying mountains of hype, but Wayne largely delivers on his latest major-label outing, scoring with conventional hip-hop tracks like “Got Money” (featuring T-Pain) and proving he can go deep and soulful when he chooses, as on the Katrina-inspired “Tie My Hands” (with Robin Thicke). Personally, I prefer the looser Weezy of his mixtape work, but the all-star roster of producers and guest vocalists on Tha Carter III does at least guarantee some musical variety even as it also guarantees a somewhat disjointed listen. Of the two songs I dislike, one was a No. 1 hit single. I am perversely proud of this. And don’t forget about The Leak EP, where the sonics finally take a backseat to Wayne’s zingers: “I graduated from hungry and made it to greedy,” he boasts on “Gossip,” still keeping it real.
(“A Milli” “Tie My Hands”)
7. Kaiser Chiefs—Off With Their Heads
With producer Mark Ronson on hand to give the Kaisers’ music a shapeliness and sonic unity missing from previous efforts, the third album from these Britpoppers is easily their best. The songwriting is sharper as well, particularly on the single “Never Miss a Beat.” There should definitely be more anti-youth-culture anthems.
(“Never Miss a Beat” “Can’t Say What I Mean”)
8. Deerhunter—Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
The music of my youth, reprocessed and spat back at me.
(“Nothing Ever Happened” “Dot Gain”)
9. DJ/Rupture—Uproot
With Josh Davis apparently having succumbed entirely to his hip-hop roots and the Avalanches on a decade-long hiatus, there have been far fewer first-rate sample-based albums this decade than I would’ve predicted 10 years ago. This mix album from Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) touches on an unusual variety of styles and moods, even for its genre. Supposedly his 2004 Special Gunpowder is even better. I intend to find out.
(“Plays John Cassavetes Pt. 2” “Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)”)
10. Erykah Badu—New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
I’ll just come right out and say that this doesn’t make the list in an average year, but the always game Badu takes some chances here, with a few standout songs, including two produced by the incomparable Madlib, mingling with the album’s solid but conventional R&B tracks, of which there are many.
(“Soldier” “The Healer/Hip Hop”)
Top 5 songs not on those albums
1. Gang Gang Dance—“House Jam”
2. Hercules and Love Affair—“Hercules Theme”
Dig it.
3. Lindstrøm—“Where You Go I Go Too”
Twenty-nine blissful minutes of Norwegian techno from the man responsible for the year's best album cover.
4. Four Tet—“Swimmer”
5. Hercules and Love Affair—“Blind”
Finally, an Antony Hegarty vocal on a song I actually like.
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