RTS: The Best of 2008--Albums
Dec. 20th, 2008 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jon_chaissonFirst things first:
I haven't done one of these in a few years, partly due to lack of time, partly due to insufficient interest (not that I hated a lot of new stuff, but let's be honest--I'm not as big a music fiend as I used to be so I wasn't as obsessive), partly due to not having paid as much attention to the music scene. Also, there's the fact that over the course of the last few years, I haven't bought and/or downloaded as much as I normally would.
So in theory:
While my theory of "every year ending in eight has awesomely great music" seems to have been punctured a bit, there were still quite a number of great albums out there. Very few who were OMGAWESOME, but that's no problem. This year I started thinking about why I love 1988's music so much, and it dawned on me that I'd been looking at it in the wrong way. Though I have a deep love for a lot of stuff from that year, thinking back, I didn't own a good amount of it that year--it was either taped from others' collections or off the radio. And even then, out of all the fun albums from that year, there's really only about a dozen, twenty tops, that I still consider favorite albums from that year.
That said:
Unlike 1998's bloviated three-page list of favorite albums from that year (I could easily prune that list down now), I realize I was stretching too far in trying to come up with my Best Of lists. That, and I was putting them together on New Years' Eve out of habit--which makes sense, since I always equate New Years' Eve to end-of-year countdowns on the radio--and over the last few years I've found it harder to try to make these lists due to time constraints, and it always feels like a too-late-after-the-fact thing to do it post-New Years'. Another thing that occured to me was that my end-of-year comps and lists back in the late 80s (and again in the late 90s and early 00s) were actually made a week or so before the end of the year. By now I know that the last few weeks' worth of releases are usually filler (and if they become big hits, they're usually big the following year). So I've stopped being so picky about the rules of who gets on the list. That was just getting overly obsessive.
SO!
Enough with the yapping and navel-gazing about my music obsession. I'll save that for a later post you can skip. :p TIME FOR THE LISTS!
The New-and-Improved Rockin' the Suburbs Best of List for 2008
Not so much a countdown as a list of great albums! Listed in kinda-sorta release date order.
ALBUMS
ELBOW, The Seldom Seen Kid--what can I say? This album is full of AWESOME on so many levels. I've been a big fan since their first album, and this one even surpasses Cast of Thousands as my favorite of theirs.
HOOVERPHONIC, The President of the LSD Golf Club--as said before, I loves me some Hooverphonic! This is a great album, an almost-return to their Blue Wonder Power Milk sound I love so much.
REM, Accelerate--whoa.[/keanu]...who knew REM could still kick ass?? After a handful of alt-lite albums, they came back and kicked major butt with this one.
PORTISHEAD, Third--the other album we've been waiting over a decade for, and at least this one is good! [/snark] Seriously...great album, and they haven't lost any of their spooky, drink-addled weirdness...
BARENAKED LADIES, Snacktime--come on, any album that has Gordon freakin' Lightfoot saying his favorite snack is pasta, has got to be good! Forget Steven Page's drug issues...this is a fun kids' album!
DUFFY, Rockferry--I <3 this album immensely, and Duffy is my GF. Forget Amy Winehouse, this is what British Soul sounds like.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE, Narrow Stairs--say what you will about DCFC, this is a great album. More pointage to them for coming up with the nerdiest love song ever with "Long Division".
WEEZER, Weezer (The Red Album)--not as rockin' as their last album, but in a way a return to form for their self-titled, color-coded albums.
COLDPLAY, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends--sure, they're popular. Sure, they're supposedly plagiarists on this album. Still--it's their best since A Rush of Blood to the Head and their finest to date. I have no complaints.
WIRE, Object 47--One of my Favorite Bands EVAR comes out with a welcome return. Not as dissonant as Send from a few years back, this one has a lot more melody. Think their beat-combo era perfectly mashed up with their noise-rock 00's return. Truly excellent stuff.
BECK, Modern Guilt--yet another excellent album that makes no sense at all, but I wouldn't expect anything less from him. ;)
OASIS, Dig Out Your Soul--Yeah, I know, it's passe to like these guys. So sue me! I love 'em anyway, and a great return to form after a few mellower albums from them.
THE CURE, 4:13 Dream--It's about time the Cure came out with another rockin' album! While 2004's self-titled was great, it didn't really stay with me...this one is more like their Head on the Door, with a lot of shorter, moodier yet poppier stuff that they do well.
SNOW PATROL, A Hundred Million Suns--I don't know how they do it, but each successive album they come out with is even better than before. Bonus points to them for having a Genesis-esque 16-minute suite at the end of the album. ;)
SONGS
the links are for the YouTube vids
CARY BROTHERS, Ride--this song came out in the middle of last year, but the first I heard it was at 3 in the morning on a Virgin Atlantic flight towards Washington DC earlier this year, and I was blown away. A beautiful, haunting song, and it needed to be listed here.
MGMT, Time to Pretend--I first thought this was a Gene Loves Jezebel song. Not the best lyrics I've heard, but any song that is this crankable is well worth being on the list.
Vampire Weekend, A-Punk--wow...this is like channeling Outlandos D'Amour-era Police on this one. And one goofy video straight out of 120 Minutes. Any song that makes me want to pogo like a demented British punk gets my vote. :)
Jack Johnson, If I Had Eyes--I was never a big JJ fan until recently, and this is a wonderful...er...non-love song.
Elbow, Grounds for Divorce--one of the many great songs on the album, and a very fitting video. This is the kind of stuff Elbow does best.
REM, Supernatural Superserious--I love this--they channel their oldest fans' high school years and perfectly puts it all into perspective. Morrissey would have approved as well. :p
Duffy, Mercy and Warwick Avenue--two sides of a really cute Brit with a lot of soul.
Death Cab for Cutie, I Will Possess Your Heart". My pick for Best Song of the Year. It's rare that I hear songs that blow me away as much as this one did. The opening that takes up half the song, the fact that each instrument is pretty much playing its own different melody, the video straight out of Lost in Translation...this is a song I wish I'd written!
Weezer, Troublemaker--sure, I could have picked "Pork and Beans" with its great YT-meme-filled video...but I like this song more! This is a fun neener-neener type of song from these guys... :p
Coldplay, Violet Hill--my first reaction was 'holy cheeze, this is Coldplay?!??' An excellent first single from an excellent album. And if we're going to go the 'Coldplay plagiarizes' route, I'd say this song seems more Dire Straits than Beatles to me. Still, I love it.
OASIS, The Shock of the Lightning--Stealing a Rolling Stones shot right at the beginning of the video? Referencing a Beatles song? Who knew? :p
SNOW PATROL, Take Back the City--bonus points for making 'whoa-whoa's cool again. And I keep forgetting how brilliant a songwriter Gary Lightbody is...another great crankable song!
I'm sure I'll make addenda to this over the course of the next few days, but this is my main list. Hope you enjoyed it! :)
I haven't done one of these in a few years, partly due to lack of time, partly due to insufficient interest (not that I hated a lot of new stuff, but let's be honest--I'm not as big a music fiend as I used to be so I wasn't as obsessive), partly due to not having paid as much attention to the music scene. Also, there's the fact that over the course of the last few years, I haven't bought and/or downloaded as much as I normally would.
So in theory:
While my theory of "every year ending in eight has awesomely great music" seems to have been punctured a bit, there were still quite a number of great albums out there. Very few who were OMGAWESOME, but that's no problem. This year I started thinking about why I love 1988's music so much, and it dawned on me that I'd been looking at it in the wrong way. Though I have a deep love for a lot of stuff from that year, thinking back, I didn't own a good amount of it that year--it was either taped from others' collections or off the radio. And even then, out of all the fun albums from that year, there's really only about a dozen, twenty tops, that I still consider favorite albums from that year.
That said:
Unlike 1998's bloviated three-page list of favorite albums from that year (I could easily prune that list down now), I realize I was stretching too far in trying to come up with my Best Of lists. That, and I was putting them together on New Years' Eve out of habit--which makes sense, since I always equate New Years' Eve to end-of-year countdowns on the radio--and over the last few years I've found it harder to try to make these lists due to time constraints, and it always feels like a too-late-after-the-fact thing to do it post-New Years'. Another thing that occured to me was that my end-of-year comps and lists back in the late 80s (and again in the late 90s and early 00s) were actually made a week or so before the end of the year. By now I know that the last few weeks' worth of releases are usually filler (and if they become big hits, they're usually big the following year). So I've stopped being so picky about the rules of who gets on the list. That was just getting overly obsessive.
SO!
Enough with the yapping and navel-gazing about my music obsession. I'll save that for a later post you can skip. :p TIME FOR THE LISTS!
The New-and-Improved Rockin' the Suburbs Best of List for 2008
Not so much a countdown as a list of great albums! Listed in kinda-sorta release date order.
ALBUMS
ELBOW, The Seldom Seen Kid--what can I say? This album is full of AWESOME on so many levels. I've been a big fan since their first album, and this one even surpasses Cast of Thousands as my favorite of theirs.
HOOVERPHONIC, The President of the LSD Golf Club--as said before, I loves me some Hooverphonic! This is a great album, an almost-return to their Blue Wonder Power Milk sound I love so much.
REM, Accelerate--whoa.[/keanu]...who knew REM could still kick ass?? After a handful of alt-lite albums, they came back and kicked major butt with this one.
PORTISHEAD, Third--the other album we've been waiting over a decade for, and at least this one is good! [/snark] Seriously...great album, and they haven't lost any of their spooky, drink-addled weirdness...
BARENAKED LADIES, Snacktime--come on, any album that has Gordon freakin' Lightfoot saying his favorite snack is pasta, has got to be good! Forget Steven Page's drug issues...this is a fun kids' album!
DUFFY, Rockferry--I <3 this album immensely, and Duffy is my GF. Forget Amy Winehouse, this is what British Soul sounds like.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE, Narrow Stairs--say what you will about DCFC, this is a great album. More pointage to them for coming up with the nerdiest love song ever with "Long Division".
WEEZER, Weezer (The Red Album)--not as rockin' as their last album, but in a way a return to form for their self-titled, color-coded albums.
COLDPLAY, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends--sure, they're popular. Sure, they're supposedly plagiarists on this album. Still--it's their best since A Rush of Blood to the Head and their finest to date. I have no complaints.
WIRE, Object 47--One of my Favorite Bands EVAR comes out with a welcome return. Not as dissonant as Send from a few years back, this one has a lot more melody. Think their beat-combo era perfectly mashed up with their noise-rock 00's return. Truly excellent stuff.
BECK, Modern Guilt--yet another excellent album that makes no sense at all, but I wouldn't expect anything less from him. ;)
OASIS, Dig Out Your Soul--Yeah, I know, it's passe to like these guys. So sue me! I love 'em anyway, and a great return to form after a few mellower albums from them.
THE CURE, 4:13 Dream--It's about time the Cure came out with another rockin' album! While 2004's self-titled was great, it didn't really stay with me...this one is more like their Head on the Door, with a lot of shorter, moodier yet poppier stuff that they do well.
SNOW PATROL, A Hundred Million Suns--I don't know how they do it, but each successive album they come out with is even better than before. Bonus points to them for having a Genesis-esque 16-minute suite at the end of the album. ;)
SONGS
the links are for the YouTube vids
CARY BROTHERS, Ride--this song came out in the middle of last year, but the first I heard it was at 3 in the morning on a Virgin Atlantic flight towards Washington DC earlier this year, and I was blown away. A beautiful, haunting song, and it needed to be listed here.
MGMT, Time to Pretend--I first thought this was a Gene Loves Jezebel song. Not the best lyrics I've heard, but any song that is this crankable is well worth being on the list.
Vampire Weekend, A-Punk--wow...this is like channeling Outlandos D'Amour-era Police on this one. And one goofy video straight out of 120 Minutes. Any song that makes me want to pogo like a demented British punk gets my vote. :)
Jack Johnson, If I Had Eyes--I was never a big JJ fan until recently, and this is a wonderful...er...non-love song.
Elbow, Grounds for Divorce--one of the many great songs on the album, and a very fitting video. This is the kind of stuff Elbow does best.
REM, Supernatural Superserious--I love this--they channel their oldest fans' high school years and perfectly puts it all into perspective. Morrissey would have approved as well. :p
Duffy, Mercy and Warwick Avenue--two sides of a really cute Brit with a lot of soul.
Death Cab for Cutie, I Will Possess Your Heart". My pick for Best Song of the Year. It's rare that I hear songs that blow me away as much as this one did. The opening that takes up half the song, the fact that each instrument is pretty much playing its own different melody, the video straight out of Lost in Translation...this is a song I wish I'd written!
Weezer, Troublemaker--sure, I could have picked "Pork and Beans" with its great YT-meme-filled video...but I like this song more! This is a fun neener-neener type of song from these guys... :p
Coldplay, Violet Hill--my first reaction was 'holy cheeze, this is Coldplay?!??' An excellent first single from an excellent album. And if we're going to go the 'Coldplay plagiarizes' route, I'd say this song seems more Dire Straits than Beatles to me. Still, I love it.
OASIS, The Shock of the Lightning--Stealing a Rolling Stones shot right at the beginning of the video? Referencing a Beatles song? Who knew? :p
SNOW PATROL, Take Back the City--bonus points for making 'whoa-whoa's cool again. And I keep forgetting how brilliant a songwriter Gary Lightbody is...another great crankable song!
I'm sure I'll make addenda to this over the course of the next few days, but this is my main list. Hope you enjoyed it! :)
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 07:15 pm (UTC)Anyways, Definitely agree on Duffy, REM, PORTISHEAD (!!!) [probably my favorite], & Coldplay. REM was really an aggressive album, which I liked and Coldplay's is probably their second best album (next to Parachutes!).
no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 01:23 pm (UTC)WOO!