top ten 10 albums from 2008

Top 10 Albums of 2008

10. Juana Molina, Un Dia

Is Juana Molina the Latin American Bjork? Er, probably not, but fans of exotic elf-women might will find a lot to like in Molina's vaguely alien song-constructions. (Plus, check out this album cover, my favorite of the year.) And, at the risk of essentializing, Molina's palette is distinctly sub-equatorial: it's sometimes classified as electronica, but it's driven at least as much by its Rioplatense vocals, Argentinian rhythmic elements, and loops of acoustic guitar. Warm, weird, and lovely. On Domino.

Listen: Juana Molina, "Vive Solo"

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9. Cloudland Canyon, Lie In Light

A lot of bands lately have returned to drink from the well of 70s-era German progressive music, but Cloudland Canyon stands out from the pack. They approach the ecstatic, psychedelic pastoralism of that era less as a source to be emulated and more as an open-ended experiment that they have made it their mission to complete. Their 2004 album Requiems der Natur was an intriguing curiosity; this year's Lie In Light is a minor masterpiece. Thanks to Chris P. for tipping me off to these guys. On Kranky.

Listen: Cloudland Canyon, "Krautwerk"

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8. Pocahaunted, Island Diamonds

The best way to imagine Bethany and Amanda, the two women who comprise Pocahaunted, is to imagine them calling to you, in their wordless sirenlike style, as you are descending deeper and deeper into a drug-induced coma. (It might even be worth waking up in the hospital just to hear these sounds.) They've been releasing a fairly steady stream of releases in obscuro formats; this one gets the nod because it benefits from its (comparatively) high-profile release on the Not Not Fun label, and because the presence of drummer Bob[b?] Bruno gives it a dose of extra structure and urgency.

Listen: Pocahaunted, "Riddim Queen"

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7. Scott Tuma, Not For Nobody

Back when I lived in Chicago, I saw Scott Tuma perform a bunch of times as part of the exemplary Good Stuff House trio, so I knew he was one of the more interesting experimental guitarists out there. But that didn't adequately prepare me to expect him to release this beautiful and curiously moving album of Americana folk guitar. It retains its "experimental" status by including a few left-of-center gestures, but it's more heartfelt than it is cerebral. Thanks to Chris M. for sending this along.

Listen: Scott Tuma, "Fishen"

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6. Brightblack Morning Light, Motion to Rejoin

As a guy who loves his Internet, I find Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes' back-to-nature / get-off-the-grid / Native-Americans-had-it-right trip a little hard to swallow at times, but listen to the music and you have to admit that they might be on to something: this bit of laid-back, smoked-out, electric psychedelic desert blues is a pretty mesmerizing piece of work. The best album Matador has put out since Matmos' The Civil War (2003).

Listen: Brightblack Morning Light, "Hologram Buffalo"

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5. Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, Glistening Pleasure

Earlier this year, I described these guys as "hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced." That sounds like something that might wear thin after a few listens, but this album became one that I found myself returning to again and again, and growing more enamored of, not less.

Listen: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, "Slow Motion Tag Team"

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4. Jamie Lidell, Jim

There's an appropriative aspect to the whole "blue-eyed soul" thing that often makes me a little squeamish, so I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy pasty-white geek Jamie Lidell's barn-burners as much as I do. On this album, Lidell's third, he strips away some of the electronic frippery and analog burble that he used to ornament his earlier albums with and plays it instead as a straight-up revivalist act. And why shouldn't he?: he's got the charisma, pipes, and songwriting chops of any one of the greats. (If you're really feeling guilty about the appropriative element and want something a little more authentic, round out your purchase of this record with a purchase of this year's fine compliation Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia.)

Listen: Jamie Lidell, "Another Day"

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3. Rameses III, Basilica

Last year, Rameses III released Honey Rose, an modest yet perfect little driftwork which ended up slipping onto my Best of 2007 list. This year's Basilica shows them growing both more assured and more ambitious, releasing a suite of astral-plane drones that evokes majesty without sacrificing their characteristic gentle lull. Imagine the broadest dawn you've ever seen and you've got the recommended visual. Includes a second disc of "remixes" by drone-underground stars like Robert Horton and Neal Campbell as a bonus. On Important.

Listen: Rameses III, "Origins V"

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2. The Dodos, Visiter

Two dudes, one on guitar and one on drums, one of them singing, and a female vocalist who occasionally joins in—sounds like an indie-pop formula that's pretty much been done to death. But the Dodos approach it with a zeal and urgency that make it seem brand new. Part of it is the emphasis on percussion: drummer Logan Kroeber works overtime to provide unusual timing for each song, providing sonic interest without devolving into wank, and guitarist Meric Long follows suit, exploring the potential of the guitar as a rhythmic device. The end result is little indie gems that also provide amazement and pleasure simply as kinetic or propulsive constructions. Endlessly listenable.

Listen: The Dodos, "The Season"

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1. Fuck Buttons, Street Horsssing

In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Bristol noise scene sagely decide to try to use structure and rhythm to harness some of the energy and intensity of noise music, in the interest of getting it to yield something amazing. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! Wild success. Interestingly, substitute "punk music" for "noise music" and you can see that acts like the Boredoms and Black Dice have also attempted a version of this experiment and attained identical results—indeed, look at Street Horsssing next to the Boredoms' Vision Creation New Sun and Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons.and it looks like nothing less than the disc that completes this decade's most awesome trilogy. Thanks to Nancy P. and Steve F., who both correctly intuited that I would like this album.

Listen: Fuck Buttons, "Bright Tomorrow"

best of 2006: a top ten

10. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
Flawed and occasionally indulgent, but St. Elsewhere earns major points for managing to be both a record that I heard or played at just about every party I was at this year and an album-length meditation on mental illness and the fragmentation of [black] identity. Improbable, but the unsettling lyrical content consistently fit perfectly into the alluring vibe generated by Cee-Lo's charismatic croon and Danger Mouse's warm grooves. The most obvious manifestation of this trick can be seen in the way they took a song explicitly about madness and disintegration ("Crazy") and got it to pass as the feel-good pop hit of the year, but the pattern is repeated everywhere on the album, from the inviting cover of the Violent Femmes' menacing "Gone Daddy Gone" to "Necromancing," an ode to necrophilia. Impressive, fascinating. On Downtown (and distributed by Atlantic).
Listen: "Who Cares?," by Gnarls Barkley

9. The Rapture, Pieces of the People We Love
Aside from "45:33," there wasn't a new LCD Soundsystem release last year, but this indie-dance release by the Rapture served as a decent stopgap, as long as you were willing to substitute Luke Jenner's sleazy charisma for James Murphy's subcultural wit. Pieces essentially updates the ideas of the disco-inflected post-punk era for an audience weaned on 80s power-pop: something like Loose Joints reinterpreted by Ric Ocasek. No claims to high significance, but definitely the most fun album I heard all year. On UMVD (aka Universal Music and Video Distribution)
Listen: "Whoo! Alright—Yeah...Uh Huh," by the Rapture

8. Keiran Hebden and Steve Reid, The Exchange Session, Vol. 1
Many, many talented people have attempted to integrate free jazz and electronic music, with outcomes that have ranged from the blandly respectable to the utterly dreadful. This disc, made up of three improvisations between sample-manipulator Keiran Hebden and longtime jazz drummer Steve Reid, avoids these fates, managing to at least partially scale the peaks that characterize the best of ecstatic '60s jazz. Hebden's body of solo work (as Four Tet) is impressive, but he seems especially freed up here by being able to hand off the rhythm duties to Reid; this allows him to stretch out and focus on the role that would normally fulfilled by an especially "free" saxophonist, namely, providing squall and color and noise. The album isn't perfect—there are moments when the pieces lose their way—but this disc provides the most substantial piece of evidence to date that these two branches of music can be successfully wed. On Domino.
Listen: "Soul Oscillations," by Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid

7. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, Between
One game you can play, if you're a music geek, is trying to determine the point where "free improvisation" became officially detached from anything resembling jazz. A related game is trying to determine the point where one bifurcated tendril of free improvisation again crossed the territorial lines of genre to become avant-garde electronica, renouncing even the tools of jazz in favor of rewired mixers, detuned radios, dismantled guitars, and repurposed iPods. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura are among the most interesting practicioners of this branch, producing stark fields of abstract electronic texture that defy easy categorization but which compel forcefully on their own terms. The two CDs comprising Between resemble not music so much as they resemble the sounds you might hear if you could tap into onboard recordings made by an interplanetary probe as it descended through a toxic, static-riddled atmosphere. On Erstwhile.
Listen: "13630 kHz," by Keith Rowe + Toshimaru Nakamura

6. Vampire Can't, Key Cutter
This disc represents three sorts of noisy music fused into an improbably well-oiled hybrid: free-jazz drumming from the ever-astonishing Chris Corsano, abrasive scuzz-rock guitar from Bill Nace, and circuit-bent squee from Jessica Rylan and her homemade machines. The on-paper incompatibility of these modes would seem to dictate that these tracks explode on the launching pad, and it's true that fully half of the songs on the disc last for under two minutes, but the fearsome blazing singularity that they attain in their short and furious lifespans is like something that came straight from the mind of God. On Load.
Listen: "War Lips," by Vampire Can't

5. Girl Talk, Night Ripper
Momus once described mash-ups (here) as "Everything that ever sold a record, all on one plate," and I think he meant it pejoratively, whereas I see it as something of a grail to strive for. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but this album from Gregg Gillis might represent the most successful attempt yet. Night Ripper jettisons the conceptual rigor that undergirds other notable mash-up albums (say, the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera, or DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century), replacing it instead with an understanding that increased density equals increased enjoyment. Highest pleasures-per-second count of any album this year. On Illegal Art.
Listen: "Hold Up," by Girl Talk

4. Mrtyu!, Blood Tantra and With Throats As Fine As Needles, s/t
I know that putting "ties" on year-end lists is kind of a cop-out, but these two discs complement one another so well that by year's end it was difficult not to think of them as a unit. They showcase two opposing sides of dronemaster Antony Milton's technique: on Blood Tantra, he submerges the listener into the cauldron of Metal's deep distortion and roar, whereas on Throats Fine As Needles he and his cadre of NZ experimentalists (Campbell Kneale, James Kirk, and Richard Francis) work with quietude and stillness, their palette built largely out of cheap electronics humming softly in subterranean darkness. Look beyond the differences in surface turbulence, though, and both discs reveal themselves as similar investigations, exploring stasis, modulation, tension and release. On 20 Buck Spin and Digitalis, respectively.
Listen: "The Worldy Skein," by Mrtyu!

3. Mountains, Sewn
For the past five years, Brooklyn's Apestaartje label has released a cool twenty discs of pastoral drone, organic noise, and sound art. I own about half of them and there's not a dud in the bunch. Mountains is an Apestaartje "supergroup" of sorts, representing a collaboration between two one-man acts, Anderegg and Aero, who have each recorded albums of abstract electronica which are individually superlative. Together, though, they seem to reinforce one another's strengths, and this album--a combination of pretty acoustic passages and warm electronic texture--is as fine as anything the label's ever put out.
Listen: "Sheets," by Mountains

2. Ghosting, Why Not Be Utterly Changed Into Fire?
The single track that comprises this album spends a half hour exploring the title question, using distorted guitars and squealing machines to conjure a circle of angelic flame around the listener, threatening to consume but also promising to transfigure. This could certainly be described as a noise album—it spends a lot of its time channeling a storm of white-hot needles through the open spaces of your skull, and the experience is undeniably harrowing—but remember that the goal here is transcendence and the methods suddenly invert, seeming magical instead of menacing. No MP3 of this one, as the disc's only track is single-minded in a way that fundamentally resists excerpting. On Jyrk.

1. Sunn O))) / Boris, Altar

Before I say anything, I should acknowledge that a fictional version of this album (accurate down to the participation of Dylan "Earth" Carlson) appeared in the 2005 April Fool's Day edition of the Aquarius Records newsletter, in which the album consists of a single E chord, with each band contributing a single note.

Pretty funny. And there's truth to the fact that this record could have been made with about that much investment of effort: since both Boris and Sunn O))) have rabid fan-bases, both acts could have come together and operated more-or-less on autopilot, piled up by-the-numbers guitar drone, and they probably would still have made bank (it's not for nothing that the title of the fictional parody album is Reserve Not Yet Met). So the fact that the end product isn't content to rest on its laurels is all the more amazing.

There are the requisite "heavy" pieces here: the opener ("Etna") and the closer ("Blood Swamp") are pretty much what you'd expect the collaboration to produce, which is not to say that they're not accomplished pieces of monolithic roar. But the album's real achievement is in the way that the intervening tracks diverge from comfort zones and expectations, and produce four tracks of genre-defying occultist weirdness: "NLT" is a gong-and-bass soundscape, "The Sinking Belle" is a Metal-inflected ballad (with vocals by singer-songwriter Jesse Sykes), "Akuma No Kuma" is an electronic anthem full of messed-up vocoder'd vocals and bombastic horns (maybe the soundtrack to a Conan movie set in Kirby-esque deep space), and "Fried Eagle Mind" is a trance-inducing bit of opiated ambience and static. The bonus disc, featuring Dylan Carlson wrangling daemonic Telecaster all over it, is just plain icing on the cake. This is the only album I bought this year on the day it was released (also the only one I bought at Metal Haven) and the only album I was eagerly anticipating that did not disappoint me (hello, Joanna Newsom and Lady Sovereign).

Listen: "Akuma No Kuma," by Sunn O))) and Boris