#1 thru 15

Well, here it is. a sudden rush of OMG to the head. i figured you could pick and choose to read about the ones that interest you if you find this the embodiment of tl;dr, but this is where this list nonsense ends for now.TOP 20071. Burial | UntrueHonestly, this was a surprise. i loved his first album, but this uk garage/2step influenced dubstep business is playing within the realm of purists that i didnt see much movement for his second one, just more of the same. which is fine because the first one was brilliant but... it's not making the top ten this year. so my head was completely blown to bits when what emerged was a more soulful, more rich, and more visual album that comes from a man who tells you the many ways in which the concept of sound can be so lovingly interpreted. r'n'b samples are pitchshifted to oblivion but stay in key to the steady crackle and ruthlessly cold beats that accompany beautiful melodies and a newly inspired aesthetic. his expertise in all these forms create one of the most moving albums i've heard in years, probably not since polmo polpo. i'm not kidding when i say i'm going to absolutely be hearing raver for the rest of my life. it's got delicious subtleties and an infectiously mobile beat, but hit hard with just enough bleary melancholy mixed with hope that the inner turmoil threatens to burst out of my chest. i am embarrassingly in love with this record.2. Justice | †what was supposed to be an embarrassing overreach of ed banger's juggernaut hype machine culminated in the release of this album from the french duo marketed rather crassly as the next daft punk. i have never been excited over any particular 'sound' as much as i have been over this label's brand of highly distorted, deceptively unformed, and conceptually lewd advocacy of all sounds high and dirty. clipping, over compression, a beat, a little grandstanding and some nasty nasty fuzz were all they really needed to create a restless record full of static and attitude contorted and spliced in equal amounts. their timing for devastation is impeccable. they carry the vaguely punk and mostly hilarious careless cool of the 80s french rock image, which is to say completely overblown but with a straight face, so when you attach to that some highly infectious and very fucking loud dance tunes, it results in the sort of untempered excess of sound and song structure you could beat someone to death with and has gotten them praise and vilification in the dance community in equal amounts. they're neanderthals who dont know shit about production and have all the class and artistry of a designer on a sugar high. they are technical nihilists and almost anti-elitist in their methods but their instincts are those that have grown within the world of dance and danceable music ever since they were aware of it. their DJ sets are equal parts 'roxanne' and 'freak'. i asked myself after the comically overdone hype settled whether this really was as good as i had initially said and trumps the intricately beautiful antics of animal collective, and i'm surprised to say that, listening to it now, that i still love this album just as much as i did before. the silly intro that shows off everything they're mainly about, the still-wonderful leadoff single, the near abstract contortions of 'new jack', the devastating 'phantom', the memories of hilarious dance-offs to uffie-splattered 'the party', the glam and flash of cheesy pop rinse 'DVNO', and the breakneck nerviness of 'stress'... the album flows seamlessly and doesnt have a weak moment of obtuseness or conceptual pitfall. it's pure black and gold electro excellence.3. Animal Collective | Strawberry Jamit's great that animal collective choose to play new material a couple of years in advance. i remember seeing them in sacramento a couple of years before this album dropped and i danced myself dizzy. i recognized nothing and loved all of it. i left in a haze of exhaustion and happiness and drank myself stupid. three days later the internet gives me youtube videos of these songs believed to be shooting stars in especially inspired live sets and not much more, i feel a great rush of memories and almost primal urges to live and breath these songs again. i proceed to piss everyone off by bobbing incessantly for a week and recollecting frustrated snatches of the night, putting them on loop in my head. after finding some decent bootegs to abuse i become satisfied and really really REALLY hope that i find these songs in the next album, and that they're not horribly perverted and robbed by studio processes. they were on the album, and they weren't ruined a bit. it's everything i remembered and had such wonderful reactions too, plus the additions of the genuinely sweet 'derek' and the frenetic 'winter wonder land'. this album is so different, and layered, and most importantly puts to rest the allegations from callous dickheads that it's all shit being thrown together randomly. i dont think it ever was (even though i dont see the problem with that) but this level of deliberate care and consideration with their myriad elements of extremes, plateaus, ambience, shimmering melodies and festivities playing side by side with rolling explosives and monolithic jams, is a band overflowing with accomplishment and an abundance of ideas.4. Radiohead | In Rainbowswell isn't this nice. i had pretty much accepted that radiohead found 'their' sound. that thom yorke was an obtuse motherfucker and was going to continue to wrestle a 'rock band' sound into his rubric of skittering excess and big computer bass to mixed and generally overcooked results. HTTT isnt nearly the train wreck people make it out to be, but it was excessively busy, while all the life that busy-ness would imply was sucked nearly lifelees buy "THAT FUCKING GUY", so even if they change some stuff around and do things differently, it's going to be some variant of a newly comfortable way of being screwy. meh.whoops. cue deceptively simple, beautifully written, and terrifically stripped songs of nuanced grace and straightforawrd musicmanship of such creative brilliance that the strength of this album overshadows and puts to rest the bands glaring weak spots from flying off the handle so many years ago. here's a novel idea when you're the class fuckaround in a room full of proper rock-with-a-capital-r bands, show the proper bands how great songs are done. Nude, Videotape, and Reckoner are the current favories.5. Underworld | Oblivion With Bellsoh my goodness, my favorite band in the history of everything not getting the number one spot by default of my insanely die-hard love and understanding for practically everything this band does? impossible. listen, i can be deluded enough to honestly feel this album is, if not better, then at least more satisfying than everything else below, but i can also love them for their crippling pitfalls, so there's a lot of love to be had. More than anything though, this album is the official announcement of their departure from the creative limbo that created the decent but generally nerveless A Hundred Days Off, which means this album is replete with a fresh sound not found anywhere else in their discography, some large embarrassments, a couple dead ends, some knockout moments of sublime beauty, and other highly accomplished feats of charming audacity. 'crocodile' is the perfectly acceptable single that slowburns its happiness into my head. things stay steady and nicely different through the big dancey 'beautiful burnout' and gradual complications of 'holding the moth', then comes the socially awkward beast of 'ring road,' where karl's constant companion book of scribbled notes get a little too ahead of him and what was supposed to be a frenetic observation of a normal day turns into a rambling dirge on a whole lot of nothing that's vaguely admirable for its unmusical chutzpah and ludicrously loud drums but veers too much on the side of being simply a bad step. then, enter glam bucket, one of their finest moments and a stunning example of how restraint produces the most subtle and sublime tracks, the minor shifts at specific moments can feel like a sudden switch or a vague shift, and it all sends goosebumps going everywhere. are we back on track? haha, no. it quickly degenerates into 'boy, boy, boy'. not just another awkward trip but a thoroughly terrible tune that rivals 'dino adventure 3d' as one of the worst directions for a sound like this to take, this is their U2 moment, and everything is wrong. fortunately it's not dabbled in too long as the second half of the album alternates with experimentation, acoustic instruments, and poetic focus within this newly found sound to inspiring degrees. for an album with so many problems, why is it here? it excites me. as almost every underworld production invariably does, and moreso than their last album. as a return from creative oblivion, it provides a fresh set of visual and aesthetic layers that continue to be inspiring through its successes and mistakes. fave tracks: glam bucket, faxed invitation.6. Do Make Say Think | You, You're A History In Rustremember mr. beast? mogwai's last album toned down the ran through post rock-isms and tried to make songs that were as lovingly polished and refined as other mogwai songs, but more fitting for the 5 minute window of regular movements and moods. all that sounds like a confusing downgrade for a band whose explosive nature is one of their more lauded trademarks, and it fooled about half the people listening in, but a solid chunk of fans saw past the newly tempered group, and heard their interpretation of translating the grand beauty of their sound inside something warm, intimate, and very FRIENDLY. i cant help but draw the same parallels between that record and this one, except this idea is probably better fleshed out here, which is why i love it so much. sounds like it was recorded in a barn, the samples of walking through a field, the goosebump-inducing tenderness of the title track, the low, grasping voices of 'a with living' and the warm domesticity of love that permeates the rest of the record is a grand shift from the wide-eyed revelations of crescendoing devastation. it's not just pleasant but enveloping. an eager but not fussy expression that mirrors the calm intricacies and beautiful textures of their surroundings7. The Field | From Here We Go Sublimebefore, i loved this album in ways where i could write it in words and i was quite comfortable doing that. even in my limited descriptive ability, i could properly express how much i loved it.there was a night though where that became pretty impossible.because i'd listen to it before in small clusters of tracks, and would appreciate how it's relentless repetition gave way to enhancing a certain vision or sentiment instead of driving me crazy. i made boards of canada comparisons left and right about how this is the only other time this has actually worked.now i just dont know what to say.this album has so much love into it but as for what it just leaves all the blanks for me to fill in. it's like the expression everything i've ever felt intimate about or attatched to. the steady, conservative beat keep its airy samples and synths grounded but they push and explode again and again and AGAIN until the last minor change-up completes the picture and drives whatever it is home. it's an open ended expression of closeness8. Pantha Du Prince | This Blissthis may seem lazy, but i came to appreciate this record in a very similar way to the field and on basically the same night, so most of how i feel about this record gets linked to the one above, even if it's reasonably different. the beauty of it is pretty similar, but it's colder, more fluid and stylistically more effete and not so minimally powerful.9. M.I.A. | Kalabusting with ideas, blindsiding everyone with amazing rhythms, and winning my personal award of best graphic designer this year, Kala is ludicrously great and rich. after 'bird flu' and 'boyz' i thought she'd just get noisier with the drums, but it's a braver album of smart, sparse, and knife sharp production, great rhythm (as mentioned before but this is really a big strong point) and desire for representation. not afraid to be just this side of almost grating with some of the cheaper but charming fx, but that lack of fear is her insane confidence in knowing how to work it.10. Múm | Go Go Smear the Poison Ivythis has actually been a large fixture when i was in ohio to counter the persistent macho man-country seriousness that was all around, but it's also good as an expression of a sensitive extreme or something. or it's just a really great album overall.despite the potential for highly annoying fairyland-in-iceland gimmick they always sort of flirt with, there's always something a little creepy and funny about their unusually consistent songwriting. i dont why a piano ballad is supposed to be some sort of kiss of death, because i havent heard any of them that sounds like the minor escapade on this album, and it's really beautiful. mum still make music i dont hear from anyone else, and its casually mysterious addictive quality have made them one of my favorite bands a long time ago. this is just continuing that excellence.11. Matthew Dear | Asa Breedwhen i first got it i decided i didnt like it. it had all the right parts to make it sound like his past albums but less dissonant and more pop, but then that pretty much resulted in giving me awful new-wave vibes, especially in 'shy'. also, deadpan lyricism/fake singing is extremely hit or miss for me, and he tried to sound refined enough so that it just sounded more like a series of missteps rather than straightforward or integrated.but matthew dear is by nature pretty awkward. i think a large part of why he works, aside from having the knack to bang out club-flatteners like "mouth to mouth", is that despite the sonic sterility and "sophistication" that minimal techno naturally invites, there's always something in his tunes that fights to make it fly out of sync. 'i gave you away' is a great example (and, i think, the evolutionary endpoint of Audion as we know it), of taking multiple elements that always threatens the combined rhythm if any one part is deliberately focused on, but reigning it back in so it can vary and hold together. matthew dear, who is less of a purist, more personal and mixed than his audion alias, is pretty uneasy but very fucking danceable, so i was probably wrong in thinking that going "more pop" would mean it'd be easier to digest. after hearing the opening track, 'fleece on brain', i thought i knew exactly what i was getting and i loved it: muffled, bouncing, dark samples and tones, slightly distorted vocals. beats that become vibrations instead, and reverb in the handclap...so it was weird when it segued into neighborhoods. it was springy, had staggered vocals, and a chorus that made little sense, his former fx were there, but it was all he bubbly ones without any of the weighty ones that would offset it. all of a sudden that delicate balancing act of his went off kilter as he got more straightforward, losing the subtlety and openly inviting comparisons to the less flattering aspects of what was 20 years ago. as gorgeous as the music for 'deserter' was, there would be lines that'd put me right off (the way he sings "just keep on searching/dont be uncertain") showed that we wasnt as in control as he'd like people to believe. 'don and sherri' came in and just made it all fucking weird. he's distorted as usual, but now with camp and some witheringly ugly vocal snippet that repeats again. the music isn't surprising, but because it goes along with him and the whole song is just... bitchy. matthew dear is never bitchy. it was weird. some of the later tracks that break from that only contributed in making the album sound like a mess rather than giving it variety.the more i live it it though, it just somehow gets better. familiarity does things to an album i still can't predict, and a lot of it has to do with shedding all the baggage and preconceptions in regards to reference. letting its internal logic sink in. whereas i made comparisons with what was before, the album became enough of a prescence to stand on its own and demand to be heard on its own terms. once the pretension of the immediate critic slips away and you let it just be, it becomes really enjoyable to hear and is probably his best album to date.for the most part.'shy' still sucks.12. Amon Tobin | Foley Roomfound sound is a sort of open book for musicians who feel like they've done what they wanted to with what they had, and if they're any good it produces decent results. if they're talented artists who have what it takes to create amazing compositions and interpretations of what they use, it becomes something really special.13. Sigur Ros | Hvarf|Heimthe biggest argument about why this should exist, and what makes this amazing since i normally cant stand acoustic "versions", which to me just sound like fiddling about to prove a point, is that sigur ros VASTLY improve on past songs to an almost alarming extent, and it's never more apparent than in staralfur. the overbearing preciousness of those super swooping strings and the wholly unecessary fireworks, elements that kept the song from being transcendantly great (instead it was just 'pretty good'), get the scaled back intimacy it so desperately needs to make it a genuinely sweet song instead of a saccharine infused explosion of prettiness. this quality applies to the rest of their acoustic versions in varying degrees. seriously this is probably the first time where i not only tolerate acoustic version, but find a really fucking good reason as to why they should be done. the new songs are pretty great, and now i have hafsol without needing to blow 12 bucks on a single.14. Arcade Fire | Neon Bibleto severely paraphrase vurt, we dig the knock-down, drag out, wide eyed passion of records like this. it's more theatrical, more polished, with a differnet range of ideas under its new league of sound. the themes are a bit more rooted in early 20th century warfare, and it's abstract enough in its scenes and settings to paint a richer visual picture rather than if they had made everything bleed apparent. the mumbling resignation of neon bible is perfect, the less flattering springsteen bracing 'antichrist television blues' is still goofily engaging and the manic end sneaks up on you, the official remastering and integration of brilliant orphan "no cars go' is more than welcome, 'intervention' is one of the top songs of this year, 15. Kalabrese | Rumpelzirkusit's funk, club, blues, and pop all put through this methodically analog filter that refuses to do anything but cater to the home listener. it's The Books without the cut up, maurice fulton without the eclectic punk screaming it's style. its theivery corporation without the "we're so chill we'll bore the fuck out of you" gimmick and genuinely acheiving laid-back funk based on how weirdly honest it is. the sounds are live, the recordings rich, the melodies simple and the vocals shamelessly awkward and hushed. an early stand-out for me is "Heartbreak Hotel." the guy barely carries a tune with him from the get go. the percussion ambles along like machines 80 years too late, and the guitar is a simple mess of scattered thum thum thum, and it blends in a beautiful, drowsy haze of a sunny satisfied nap. some of the record is funny, a consistent tag running throughout one track is about having a pain in one's ass. then some of it jerks about in a nerd-whitey version of a 9 minute funk out in "auf dem hof", and it's brilliant.so then! to wrap this up here's that burial track that'll stay with me forever:happy new year, all.