LIST: 40 Best Albums of 2005

With a new year looming fast it's time again to sort out the noise of the past twelve months. Let's dive right in...

1. Sufjan Stevens Come on Feel the Illinoise! After two consecutive #4 finishes on the annual Eighth Nerve pile-up Suf-J sets a new mark for off-beat pop/folk with his carnival of love for the Land of Lincoln. The guy makes it look easy, and makes an easy selection for this year's #1.
2. New Pornographers Twin Cinema A really good band that starts looking like a pretty awesome band with a bigger brand of their grown-up power pop.
3. Spoon Gimme Fiction Austin based alt-rockers keep it simple with dimly lit songs sweating sexual tension and wearing loosely a mild fear of things that go bump in the night.
4. Sleater-Kinney The Woods This metal-edged departure feels both familiar and startlingly fresh, breathing new vitality into the Rock and Roll we all remember and love.
5. The Robot Ate Me Carousel Waltz Oddly sweet and sweetly odd, this is my Big Surprise album of the year.
6. The Books Lost and Safe Found sound and digital hush manipulators find a deeper soul and a clearer voice.
7. Ryan Adams &; The Cardinals Cold Roses This grew on me. Adams seems to be able to cut loose and let the songs unfold with a greater sense of maturity.
8. Wolf Parade My Apologies to the Queen Mary More earnest and energetic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink holler rock from Montreal. Wolves!
9. M. Ward Transistor Radio A hand-crafted album that sounds both new and old, fresh and time-tested.
10. Great Lake Swimmers s/t You can actually hear crickets chirping throughout the album.
11 / 12. Bright Eyes I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning / Digital Ash in a Digital Urn Young Connor Oberst peaked early this year with his dual releases, but "Wide Awake" still resonates, and "Digital Ash," arguably the lesser half of Oberst's original material this year, is holding up remarkably well in a Death Cab dominated market.
13. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah s/t (Nearly) rivals the ecstatic bombast and oddball sentimentality of Neutral Milk Hotel, Hefner and Arcade Fire. Clap your hands, indeed!
14. The Go! Team Thunder, Lightning, Strike Authentic samples of cheerleaders over tinny, upbeat instrumentals nearly convinces me that true pop-songs don't always need a singer. A soundtrack for some weirdo fun you haven't had yet.
15. Andrew Bird Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs Like Decemberists and Damien Rice, Bird makes the simple things sound rich and theatrical.
16. Six Organs of Admittance School of the Flower Bay Area freak-out rock band Comets on Fire guitarist gets all sensitive and prog and stuff. Free jazz for the post-rock / new-folk set for whom jazz = hell.
17. Prefuse 73 Prefuse 73 Reads The Books See The Books Lost and Safe above. Abbreviated take on glitch-pop + a bottom end. It isn't likely to pack lap-top toting audio nerds into techno clubs or send sugar addict loop fiends in search of Max Richter... but it might.
18/19. Iron & Wine w/ Calexico In the Reins + Iron & Wine Woman King ep Even though they are markedly different albums I'm bundling them together as two halves of the year's progressively more ambitious and revelatory effort. The Sam Beam story gets richer by the day, I can't wait to see where it leads... Now if Beam would just sing with the same gusto with which he is writing and playing.
20. Low The Great Destroyer You know the universe is a relative place when this is a "rock" album. Veteran shoe-gazers amp up their earnest shuffling to generate a mild but memorable electric charge.
21. Wilco Kicking Television: Live In Chicago I'm not typically a fan of live albums, but this presents a band (my favorite one, at that) playing for a hometown crowd at a moment when its creative and popular peaks coincide. Newer material from "Ghost" and "YHF" is showcased with an emphasis on the band's emerging Sonic-Dead incarnation.
22. Beck Guero His Beckness falls short of true greatness by failing to do what he does best - reinterpret a genre through that beautifully tweaked thing he calls a brain. He'll have to settle for mere extremely-goodness.
23. Common Be Soul and hip-hop brilliantly balanced by the increasingly luminous Chicago based MC.
24. Bear vs. Shark Terrorhawk If you listen carefully you can hear the arm and back muscles of guitarists Marc Paffi and Derek Kiesgen stretch and swell in tune.
25. Franz Ferdinand You Could Have It So Much Better Bigger, Faster, Louder, Yea! Franz largely stays the course on this second outing, veering left and right rather than digging in.
26. Decemberists Picaresque I would like to thank the Decemberists for giving me the opportunity to use the word Dickensian.
27. Broken Social Scene s/t Somewhere behind the heavy smoke screen of reverb and scaling keyboards there is a really good album here.
28. Caribou The Milk of Human Kindness "Manitoba" digi-pop artist delivers a less frenetic blend of techno and indie-rock.
29. Bloc Party Silent Alarm I saw this coming like it had been set on fire and hurled across the Atlantic by a giant catapult. Somebody might have yelled "duck!" but instead we all ran toward its bright glow. Hyperactive and self-serious, I expect them to burn out fast in the icy shadows of fellow brits Radiohead and Coldplay. That being said, it's pretty decent indie rock the way the kids like it these days... all emo and high-hats.
30. Son Volt Okemah and the Melody of Riot The new Son Volt sounds remarkably like... the old Son Volt. Jay Farrar's guitar-driven roots rock unit slightly over-reaches its sound with modern day dust bowl politics, but still manages to kick up some dirt.
31. Death Cab For Cutie Plans The success of digipop alter ego Postal Service and some heavy championing by Fox TV's uber hip "The O.C." puts "Plans" in an unusual spot. Moody and populist, dim and bright. Boring and interesting.
32. The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan It's possible the White Stripes have achieved market saturation, jaundicing my view of the band. "Satan" veers back toward their Detroit soul and rock origins and away from the hillbilly-metal blues they've been sweating, which I think is a good thing. That and the occasional Target ad or Coke jingle.
33. Bonnie Prince Billy & Matt Sweeney Superwolf This is what the good Rev. Will Oldham sounds like when he's given access to a big bag of weed and some electricity. More wolves!
34. Hail Social s/t Hail Social is to Joy Division what Winger was to Van Halen. Ooh, that must sting. This has all the hallmarks of a future guilty pleasure. If it's any consolation I still have a Winger cassette around here somewhere... "She's only seventeen...SEVENTEEN!"
35. Stars Set Yourself on Fire Largely indistinguishable from emo-friendly luminaries Coldplay, Bloc Party, etc... not bad but not original enough to place higher.
36. Oranges Band The World and Everything in it See "Stars" entry above.
37. Caitlin Cary & Thad Cockrell Begonias Cary finds in Cockrell what her solo albums missed without Whiskeytown partner Ryan Adams - balance, harmony and texture. There is chemistry, but the pair lacks the tension and excitement needed to make most songs really stick. Speaking of Ryan Adams...
38. Ryan Adams & The Cardinals Jacksonville City Nights Adams as the drunken country-western roadhouse singer somehow doesn't play as well as Adams the drunken urban-transplant troubador or even Adams the drunken Phil Lesh worshiper.
39. Super Furry Animals Love Kraft Welsh rock collective looks back to seventies prog and lets their usual off-kilter brand of sunny pop get bogged down in a murky, apocalyptic sci-fi sound.
40. Devendra Banhart Cripple Crow Damn hippie.


Notable ommissions:
Antony and the Johnsons I Am a Bird Now I managed to spend the entire year without needing to wallow in urbane cabaret mope, no matter how stark or beautiful. Just seeing the guy's photo makes me want to cry, I can't imagine what hearing him sing would do.
LCD Soundsystem s/t So many promising NYC experimental, arty digi-pop dance-punk bands, so little time. I'd like to get into this, it just didn't happen in 2005.
Weezer Make Believe If you can smell a turd a block away is there really any point in walking over to pick it up? The Weez let me down... long live the Weez!
Kanye West Late Registration It's true, ubiquitous hip-hop superstars don't get much PT at my house. While I'm sure this album will breath deeply the thin air at the top of many year-end lists, I just didn't get around to it.

REVIEW: Ryan Adams & The Cardinals "Jacksonville City Nights"

Rating: 6

With "Jacksonville City Nights" (once re-named then un-named "September") Ryan Adams seems to be padding his resume and ever growing catalog with another genre album.  2003's "Rock-n-Roll" saw Adams stitching the "alt-" that usually preceeds his Country label onto straight-ahead Rock.  This time  he has shed the "alt-" altogether and embraced the Country within.  He's not quite ready for the Grand Ole Opry but there is plenty of slide steel and fiddle on most tracks to push the southern fried feel of "Cold Roses" away from the Allman Brothers and just a little toward the Stattlers. 

Songs evoke a bitter-sweet nostalgia for the deep south - humid nights, Jesus, scuffed cowboy boots and love lost for liquor.  Many numbers find Adams singing in a slightly lower register than his usual high tenor, creating a persona that is perhaps more earnest and certainly more relaxed even as he struggles to bridge the break in his own voice.  Maybe call it his church voice.  It also tends to bleed some of the urgency and twenties-something angst from his sound, a tension that is more than welcome when it does show up.  Then again Adams turned 30 last year, so...

The Cardinals prove to be a versatile and adept backing unit, good at building texture and varying the pace from tear drenched country to road ramblling blues.  Taken together, this year's releases - "Cold Roses," "Jacksonville" and the upcoming "29" - could mark a significant period of maturation for Adams as a songwriter even as he explores a few side tracks along the way.  You know what they say, peel an onion...

REVIEW: Sufjan Stevens "...Invites You To Come On Feel the Illinoise"

Rating: 9.5

There are some people who make you think “Gee, I’d like to be friends with them, they seem like really interesting friends to have…”  Then in the next breath you think “Actually, I’m kind of glad they’re not my friends, they seem a little too interesting, like maybe they're in a cult or really rich or something…”  No?

C’mon, you know what I’m talking about.  There’s a group of decent looking – okay, quite attractive - people in casually hip urban fashions sitting around a table drinking chai.  "I've never tried chai, I wonder if it's sweet?" you think to yourself.  Their eyes sparkle with zeal as they talk, using their hands and pointing at things you can’t see but which seem so very real.  There are no loud guffaws and no awkward silences; no one seems to feel left out.  .

You think to yourself “my friends and I don’t sit and talk like that, not about ideas, not about history… celebrity divorces maybe, but not Frank Lloyd Wright.”  And you don’t.  “That looks nice, I’d like to be part of a group like that.”  You think.  “Maybe I’d like to be part of that group…”  Wouldn’t that be great, to sip chai and talk about big ideas and the world and neat stuff like that... it would be like living in a sitcom!

Then again, that could be a lot of work.  There’s probably a defacto reading list and a ton of inside jokes.  You’ll spend a small fortune trying to figure out what they listen to, what they wear.  You’ll probably need to learn a second language.  Plus in a group like this there are bound to be some weird dynamics lingering below the surface.  You know someone hooked up with the guy in the cap, the one who looks like Enrique Iglesias and Wilmer Valderrama’s long lost half brother.  Maybe she did – or maybe he did.  Maybe both.  Who are you to judge.

These folks are working in broad strokes on a huge canvas.  The rest of us prefer Polaroids and Post-it notes.  I mean really, can you believe that guy - the one in the cap – he’s recording an album of songs for each of the fifty states?  And you can barely keep up your collection of new quarters.  By the way, have you seen Oregon?  Bor-ing.

However fascinating and brilliant these people are they are not accepting applications.  When the time is right they will come to you.

But I digress.

I love Sufjan Stevens and I love this album.  I love that he really does plan to record one for each of our fine states.  I love that this is only his second installment in the magnum opus-to-be since “Michigan” arrived in 2003, that at this rate we’ll see “Idaho” sometime around 2104, and that he can still come up with enough material for the laudable “Seven Swans” in the midst his US civics project.  I’ll still love it even if half of his fifty states albums are EPs – what can you say about Arkansas in twenty songs that you can’t cover in eight?  I love the ambitious young Mr. Stevens like a weird relative I never see and won’t go out of my way to call.  Maybe it’s just easier to appreciate him from afar.  Actual conversations are always a little weird and definitely tiring.  It takes energy to engage so much sincerity, such big ideas.  Plus there’s all the born again Jesus stuff.

Speaking of Jesus, the album starts with a song about UFOs.  Heavenly lights, angelic visitations and unexplained phenomena have always made equally good fodder for pop songs and bible stories.  It’s a gentle and gently weird opening number, but on an album that boasts nearly two-dozen tracks Suf-J can easily afford a proper welcome mat - one that says “This is not your chamber of commerce approved tribute to the Land of Lincoln, but it’s interesting so come on in.”

Generally speaking the album balances the paradoxical ambitions at work in the greater project.  On one hand Suf-J (I’m going to keep using that until it sticks) expands his sound to celebrate the ubiquity of an entire state, particularly one containing America’s Second City and a great lake, though there is no overt mention of that lake (Lake Michigan, perhaps glossed over to avoid confusion with his previous state-centric offering “Greetings from Michigan”).  On the other hand he is presenting what seems like a collection of significant and specific personal experiences informed by and located in a place.  The grand scope and balanced sensitivity is reflected in the album’s collection of poetic song titles where “A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But for Very Good Reasons,” a medium-length label by Suf-J’s standards, belies an empathy and respect for the fragile human nature of disappearing players in a vast historical play.

Upbeat songs like “Come On! Feel The Illinoise!,” “Chicago,” and “The Man Of Metropolis…” play as if scoring a cheeky video montage of Stevens and friends cavorting around town, mugging for pictures in all the places you’ve ever recognized as Illinois-ey.  Famous natives are casually name-checked but not belabored (Carl Sandberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, Abe Lincoln).  Stevens wisely spends more time on the stories you don’t need an entire wing of the library to tell; those touching and occasionally odd tales that stick in your mind only to be dislodged by some seemingly unrelated tidbit when you least expect it.  From the aching honesty of a moment captured and somewhat misleadingly titled “The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us!” to the stark and lingering “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” the abstract and incomprehensible are humanized without removing the gory stingers.

While there are plenty of great moments to relish the album sounds best in its entirety – a whole greater than the sum of its considerable and many parts - an unusual feat for what could easily have been a throwaway pop-concept piece in a series of likeably similar efforts.  Sufjan Stevens’ musical postcard from Illinois plays like a concise autobiography of a long trip in a rented van, maybe while listening to The Who's "Tommy" or Disney World’s “It's a Small World” attraction.  Like any good road trip, songs match celebration with introspection, leaving behind memorable images and revealing more about the passengers than the passing scenery.  And isn’t that the point?  The ebb and flow of the songs, their wit, whimsy, and sullen charm, make the album good.  The gentle tide of emotions shared while listening, its ability to linger and inspire reflection, makes it something greater than a collection of songs on a theme, it makes this a great album.

LIST: Kyle's Totally Shameless Twelve Days of Music Wish List, 2005

Ah, it's that greedy time of year again.  The best gifts are the ones the recipient will like but would never buy for himself.  So with that in mind please sing along!  "On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me..."

1. LCD Soundsystem "s/t"
2. Blood on the Wall "Awesomer"
3. The National "Alligator"
4. Okkervil River "Black Sheep Boy"
5. The Rosebuds "Birds Make Good Neighbors"
6. Wooden Wand "Harem of the Sundrum and the Witness Figg"
7. Great Lake Swimmers "Bodies and Minds"
8. Boy Least Likely To "Best Party Ever"
9. My Morning Jacket "Z"
10. Jens Lekman "Oh You're So Silent Jens"
11. Antony and the Johnsons "I am a Bird Now"
12. Bell Orchestre "Recording a Tape the Colour of Light"