2008 Albums List: 19-11

11. Girl Talk - Feed The Animals
12. Clark - Turning Dragon
13. British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?

what throws me for a loop is that i completely did not give a shit about this album for 8 months and didnt think i ever would.
then i'm at work and i get 'waving flags' in my head. i start thinking about their strengths and weaknesses regarding why they've had little effect on me despite making full-blooded songs of passion and vigor. i sing the few lines i know to myself as im hanging signs outside and while i'm bringing the giant ladder back into storage i think of them as an amiable band that create a image better than a song, of people heroically greeting incoming ships on the shore during biting winds on a clear day. it's cheesy and cliché but it cant be helped (as so many things i've learned to stop shitting around and embrace). and i think maybe it's because it's so easy that it just doesnt do much for me.
i let it sit there until i get home and i put it on just to get it out of my system, let the rest play because i'm doing something else, and during the next song (canvey island) i realize that it's very loud and extremely alive and i think to myself "how did we get there?"
20 minutes later and this album is really... epically big-hearted. the first song is a nice track but a bad choice because to any cynic it just sounds anthemic and silly and the rest follows by being busy and driving but made a bit empty.
but really.
rock music. do you like it
it's not sound and fury for nothing. it's people writing good movements, hooks, choruses, timing, drumming and playing out of their hearts that arent fueled by alcohol and angst but by air, weirdly enough. not-cold-enough-to-fog but the kind to clear the lungs, ballooning their zealousness and driving the songs ever higher. pitchfork stupidly compared their crass amplitudes to U2 but i hear none of the stadium baiting schmaltz that worthless band are guilty of on this album, just headlong fun and an undercurrent of antiquated appreciation for the home and the nature that brought them to it.

14. Ellen Allien - Sool

while ellen's been doing whatever the hell she wants for awhile, i think thrills was the first fumbling step towards a clean sound with lush implications that sool is getting ever closer to, and it's starting to sound not only unique but incredibly exciting. "caress" and "zauber" are big highlights for me.

15. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna

This is probably the hardest comment to write. Has an intensity that pulls from musc of all directions and hunkers down for a focused freak out that springs from international influences that span genres and translate them inordinately well to make an album we've heard bits of everywhere else but never quite like this, which makes it perfect coming out of new york. Gets my stamp of most original thing I've heard this year, getting that rush of the new and radical sound that no one's making nearly as well as they are.

16. Autechre - Quaristice
17. Dusk + Blackdown - Margins Music
18. Onur Ozer - Kasimir

i was talking about "throttled techno" earlier but in comparison this would make Bruno sound positively liberated in the open spaces he indulges in relative to the suffocatingly hot yet terse arrangements of ozur. stoic but not sterile, his ascending funks and abbreviated samples snake themselves around yr ears. taking a cue from Villalobos' "Fizheuer Zieheuer", there's horns and wind instruments aplenty to give it a strong eastern vibe, but not overridingly, annoyingly, "world groov"ingly so. he and pronsato often got mentioned in the same breath and fittingly so.

19. M83 - Saturadays = Youth

Pink Floyd's "Momentary Lapse of Reason" made me hate the 80s at an unfortunately VERY early age. i wont get into it but every 80s album was seen through those glasses and subsequently had to crawl out of a very big hole to be taken seriously. yet this album somehow corrals all those sentiments and other nuances i've felt about the time and puts in the parallel of growing pains with new technology mirroring the growing pains of being a teenager, and all of a sudden the messy enthusiasm and overzealousness becomes instantly charming and i embrace it more than i could have predicted after being warned in advance of an un-ironic 80s album from M83. an album that goes big, gets naive, and reaches desperately for transcendent connections, understood as being the only meaningful sensation, by being as emotionally exposed and shameless as possible. it comes complete with especially terrible spoken 'poetry' of prematurely jaded youth thats as understandable as it is painful to hear, and i feel i have to cheer it on so it can grow up and cobble the raw beginnings into something complete and brilliant.
except that anthony gonzalez is 27 now, so while he can look back and reflect that frustrated passion to the last synth, he can also write songs that comes from four studio albums of experience, restraint (being a funny idea for M83 but it's there), and knowing what works and what doesnt, so what results is expertly controlled nostalgia that plays like a reissue of the greatest album of its time.