LIST: 20 Best Albums of 2004

You had to guess it was coming - an end-of-the-year ranking of the year's best albums! It was a good year for music with a tough race for the #1 slot and a relatively late entry taking the prize by a clear margin. So, in the spirit of eating your dessert first...

1. The Arcade Fire Funeral A funeral should sound so good - all the catharsis with very little grief. Give it time, it may be your new favorite album too. 
2. Secret Machines Now Here Is Nowhere Breaking the sound barrier and redefining space-rock. 
3. Franz Ferdinand s/t “…feel the word and melt upon it…”. Ohhh yeaah. 
4. Sufjan Stevens Seven Swans This guy can write one beautiful song after another, and with his ambitions set on scoring an album for each of the 50 states (last year's "Greetings from Michigan" = 1 down, 49 to go) it's a good thing. 
5. Iron & Wine Our Endless Numbered Days Sam Beam puts a new beard on southern ballads with higher production quality and deeper instrumentation than his debut “Creek Drank the Cradle." 
6. Interpol Antics Turn on the Bright Lights” is pretty hard to beat. They wisely opt not to reinvent themselves but plunge deeper into what they do best. And it works. 
7. Greg Davis Curling Pond Woods Atmosphere is everything on this fluid and sonicly rich laptop-folk (folk-top?) disc. Plus there's mention of obscure Canadian ice sports in the title, c'mon! 
8. Modest Mouse Good News For People Who Love Bad News Ohmygod did Isaac Brock really just eat Tom Waits’ copy of “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”? No, it just sounds that way. 
9. Wilco A Ghost Is Born It must be hard living up to such high expectations, especially when you make exceeding them look so easy. Besides, there are poems to write and books to publish… 
10. The Album Leaf In A Safe Place Dreamy sound-scaping blurs the use of traditional instruments and twiddling with knobs. Good music for flying on airplanes and other thin-air activities. 
11. Mission of Burma OnOffOn They're back and have picked up right where they left off. It's almost as if they have been stored in an influence-tight plexiglass case for fourteen years. Given some of the crap that's gone on in that time this proves to be a good thing. Rock! 
12. Of Montreal Satanic Panic In The Attic Don’t let the title fool ya, there’s no need to panic. More wiggly weirdness than evil prevails here. 
13. various artists Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster Performances of standards you didn't know you knew so well by folksy artists you wish you knew better. 
14. Liars They Were Wrong So We Drowned How can you not love a post-punk, no-dance, no-pop noise-noise album about English witch trials? How? 
15. Steve Earle The Revolution Starts… Now Timely though hardly timeless, Steve Earle is the closest thing our generation gets to Bob Dylan now that the latter has committed himself for permanent display at the Smithsonian. 
16. Comets on Fire Blue Cathedral You thought Santa Cruz was all surfing and drum circles and poser kids scammin’ quarters downtown but it is soooo much weirder… and louder! Actually the Comets are based in San Francisco now but it doesn't matter, they're louder, more chaotic and further out there than anyone in that town too. Next time you need to freak out you need the Comets. 
17. Dizzee Rascal Boy In Da Corner Hearing this is like discovering porn for the first time. It's startling, intriquing, confusing, and leaves you feeling guilty for having enjoyed it. Again. And again... 
18. The Fiery Furnaces Blueberry Boat Forget whatever you thought you knew about them from "Gallowbird's Bark" and imagine Flannery O'Connor writing a rock opera. No? Agreed, it's a little weird, but not bad. 
19. Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse The Grey Album How would you piggy back onto the biggest hip-hop money train in town? Skip the $75 million lawsuit and remix Jay's "Black Album" vocals over the Beatles' "White Album" score. If only all the gutsy genius it took to make it happen came through the speakers. Still... and of course the totally illegal download of the album. 
20. Castanets Cathedral After hearing a toy piano in the opening track I am reminded of The Simpsons episode #272 "Homer the Moe" wherein Moe explain's his bar's new decor as weird for the sake of being weird (paraphrased). This is fractured, backwater-tinged ear art not for those afraid to experiment. And also not too bad.

LIST: Kyle's Totally Shameless Twelve Days of Music Wish List, 2004

In keeping with the Christmas tradition of asking for things you don't need and the equally important American tradition of crass and offensive behavior around the holidays (or any day) I offer you this - my Twelve Days of Music Wish List, 2004.  Because Christmas comes just once a year and greed knows no age.

1. Whiskeytown “Strangers Almanac”
2. Physics “1”
3. Rachels “Systems/Layers”
4. Pine Valley Cosmonauts “The Executioner’s Last Song Vol. 2-3”
5. The Books “Thought For Food”
6. Billy Schuh and the Foundry “Fathers As Robots”
7. Greg Davis “Arbor”
8. Charlemagne "Charlemagne"
9. Wilco “The Wilco Book” (book and cd)
10. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band “Will The Circle Be Unbroken – The Trilogy” box set
11. various artists “Kentucky Mountain Music” box set
12. Sufjan Stevens “Seven Swans”

REVIEW: Arcade Fire "Funeral"

Rating: 10

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief,
Expels diseases, softens every pain,
Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.
- John Armstrong, Composer (Canada)

Nearly three years ago my grandfather died. His name was Norbert. I saw him that summer then again at Christmas. The myloma had returned sometime in between the two visits.

In hospice I held him by his arms so a nurse could bathe him. I walked him to the toilet that way, marveling that someone with so little flesh could move himself at all - guessing that he once helped me walk like that as an infant.

My wife and I came back for the funeral a few months later. I wanted to help but everything except the eulogy seemed to be taken care of, so I volunteered. I combined the notes my Mom made with a few of my own and I wrote a little speech. It made me feel useful, like maybe I could help.

As soon as I approached the podium, and for the years since, I knew I was wrong. No matter what I would say it would have little to do with helping other people. If it did then that was luck. Hearing the right words can make you feel better I suppose, but speaking them heals. That and time.

Fortunately I haven’t had to attend many funerals. When I have I’ve managed to pick up some extra guilt beyond the normal amount we seem obligated to feel. I think it comes from realizing that someone literally had to die to get me to speak to my relatives, and failing to take advantage of that opportunity compounds it. Instead we make small talk about our jobs, vacations, even the weather. Still, we go because it’s important and we mingle because we have to, and we get it mostly wrong every time.

The Arcade Fire got it right. In terms of the whole idea of a funeral, which warrants mention given the album’s title, and just in terms of the music.

I knew I liked it as soon as I heard it. Actually I knew I would like it after I’d had a chance to hear it a few more times. It’s not something that has to grow on you. That implies it might be annoying or somehow unpleasant in another way, which it isn’t. It’s more like something that needs time to grow in you, time to plant itself and find its way.

The Arcade Fire is sort of a family themselves. Win and Regine are married and Win’s brother Will is in the band. Regine’s grandmother died shortly before she and Win married, and they were married shortly before recording began. Win and Will's grandfather died during recording. So did Richard’s aunt Bessie (Richard is in the band). They all live in Montreal, Quebec. Those are the basics, though I did leave out a member or two whose families are presumably intact. You won’t find out a lot from the band’s promo information which seems artfully simple and elusive by design. Elusive but not deceptive, like their sound.

It is hard to pin down, which makes them infinitely more interesting and difficult to write about. I’m resisting the very amateur-feeling urge to tell you to trust me and buy the album, assuring you that you’ll love it or at least see why I think it’s so good. After all, it made the top spot on my best of 2004 list, and I’m in good company recommending it (pitchforkmedia.com). But it’s one of those things that’s hard to talk about. Like why someone likes chocolate. Or doesn’t.

It feels important and unexpected. It is beautiful and artistic without feeling over dressed. It is earnest, urgent and full but not sappy, hurried or indulgent. It is revealing but not embarrassing; cathartic but not weepy. It feels very much alive, and like all living things capable of growth and change.

With that last bit I realize I am doing what this album mercifully avoids; slipping into schmaltz. The Arcade Fire tread a fine line stretched taught over deep, dark pits full of lesser bands babbling streams of platitude. A step too far in any direction and one is likely to join them, remembered immortally as a stoic, cynic, crybaby or cheese-ball. Where others might have sounded trite or melodramatic The Arcade Fire taps into its own combined heartache and strikes a balance between life, love and loss by owning their experiences, good and bad, and finding ways to put them into perspective. They remember what sound like specific events and people with names, and sing of them in alternately stark and glowing light. And in these memories they find a broader truth - flooding raw emotion elegantly channeled through the simplest of all intellectual filters - music.

For those in need of reference points you’ll hear early U2 guitars; Pixies rhythms via Modest Mouse; the cinematic bombast of Neutral Milk Hotel; and an occasional jazz-tinged female vocal performance from Regine who, when given her moment to shine, sounds a little like Bjork. Songs move from one to the next with purpose like chapters in a book while the rich instrumentation and production expand to fill the imagination’s largest, most filigreed hollow halls.

Better yet, in 1964 Diana Ross and The Supremes released “You Can’t Hurry Love,” then 1966 saw the release of “Pet Sounds.” Somewhere in between (and I don’t think I mean 1965) is the foundation of this album’s sound. Tracks #6 and #7, “Crown of Love” and “Wake Up,” draw refreshingly on Motown doo-wop and dreamy bedroom balladry for a mood at once reminiscent, innocent and completely original. Though the album is best heard cover to cover check out the third track “Une Annee Sans Lumiere” for a glimpse at why it is so moving as a whole, with a slow-drawing build of emotion up to the 2:45 mark where all is liberated, released into joy and not despair. Twinkling spots of light from major chords pierce thrombing pipe organ clouds and a drum kicks down heavy wooden doors.

Again, I have stepped in it. I am no match for the wrenching poignancy of lines like “When daddy comes home you always start a fight; So the neighbors can dance in the police disco lights;” or the universality in “They say a watched pot won’t ever boil; You can’t raise a baby on motor oil; Just like a seed down in the soil you gotta give it time."

Hearing the right words might make you feel better, but speaking them heals. That and time. No one should have to deliver more than one eulogy but everyone should write at least one, though few are likely to be as stirring, hopeful and healing as Funeral. I hope it doesn’t take someone dieing to rouse The Arcade Fire to further genius - maybe Win and Regine will have a baby and start writing lullabies.