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.
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