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My Year In Lists
This is a list of my favorite albums of 2008. Obvious, right? Trite, but sincere. My list is not much cooler than anything you might find on Pitchfork, you have probably already heard it all before, and seen most of these albums all over all sorts of year-end lists, and well, here they are again. I’m not gonna talk about super cool low budget Swedish vampire movies, or the stark conviction of some Brooklyn Noise artist, I’m just going to lay out albums that I really enjoyed and that I think really defined the sound of 2008, you know stylistically, or some shit like that, but mostly I just liked them. So, here they are, and it’s not in any top ten order, but there is definitely an order about it all.
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5. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair
Here come the horn and violin stabs, and if they aren’t well placed, then how do you feel about the vocals scattered around these noveau disco jams? Anthony Hegarty lends his expressive voice to DJ Andy Butlers disco project “Hercules and Love Affair” to wondrous results. With an infatuation with Greek mythology and well… um, homo-eroticism, Hercules and Love Affair bring disco back to the dance floor, and boy do they. This music evokes every single scene that ever occurred in Studio 54, but also incorporates enough contemporary sequencing elements to make the sound fresh and able to withstand the gritty electro jams of the majority of today’s dance music. When/if you listen to this album just be ready to make evocative eyes at someone across the room okay, that’s really all I need to say, the bass will tell the rest of the story.
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[Audio:http://www.seattlesubsonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/02-hercules-theme-1.mp3]
Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules Theme
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1. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
This was the hardest album for me to review, because I just didn’t know where to start, that’s one of the many reasons that it is number one on the list. Now keep in mind that Dan Whitford is a master DJ with a penchant for the aesthetic of bands like Fleetwood Mac and ABBA, but also New Order and Roxy Music, these pop sensibilities shine through on Cut Copy’s sophomore album. Recorded with Tim Goldsworthy (DFA, The Loving hand), and implementing a great combination of vintage and modern synths, real and sampled drums, and sampled flourishes, Cut Copy has shined a light on the blue print for all of the intricate components of pop music mastery. Taking their cues from a wide array of dance, disco, pop and punk, and synthesizing them all together in such a potent concoction as to create the dance/pop sound of 1974, 1982, 1987, and most importantly 2008. And all of the shit that went along with all of these years is scraped away, and promptly thrown aside, allowing for the diamonds hidden beneath it all to shine bright. Now I think that there are a lot of talented bands out there, who could commit to tape a single that does all of this, but that’s not what Cut Copy did, they made a whole freakin album. With all of the tracks relative to one another, detailing a lifetime of doubt at a party, and a night of triumph all at one, short teasing tracks tie the album together, and hits bleed together in beautifully manipulated waves of sound bouncing off themselves just before the perfectly executed drum groove comes in and the pop starts it off once again.
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[Audio:http://www.seattlesubsonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/03-lights-and-music-1.mp3]
Cut Copy – Lights and Music
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8. No Age – Nouns
Now, I must say, complacent I may be, I still have some pent up aggression, I like to listen to garage rock abrasion, the idea of harnessing noise for a visceral reaction is pretty interesting, and in 2008, no one did it better than No Age. Enough said, maybe, but for starters buried beneath all of the distortion, and the bombast, there is an unmistakable sense of melodic sensitivity. For all its noise, and this duo sure does have enough at its disposal, this album has an absolutely acute sensitivity for emotion, this band can force you forward at a constant unerring speed, but still convey some very different messages from song to song. Until this album I was relatively certain that there were only so many types of distorted noise that a guitar could assault me with, since this album, I have decided that there are at lease twice as many as I guessed before, and that my estimate is still sadly lacking.
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[Audio:http://www.seattlesubsonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/02-eraser.mp3]
No Age – Eraser
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3. M83 – Saturdays = Youth
Saturdays = Youth is more eighties than a lot of things from the 1980’s. But its also another pop speckled electronic album from M83’s Anthony Gonzalez. Certainly the gems here are the one-two punch of Kim and Jessie and Graveyard Girl, but for followers of M83’s early work a marked evolution is noticeable in the execution of the long form bubbling electro pop and ambient marches of teen angst. Recorded in Anthony Gonzalez’s home studio using only equipment from the 1980’s this album has a definite call back feel from the time period it seeks to emulate, but so much of what people seem to hate about the 80’s is implemented so perfectly on this album that no one can help but be endeared to these songs about teenage emotions sung in a broken, reverb drenched, French accent. Do you remember being 15, and god, you were pissed off and depressed about something, and you couldn’t express it to save your life, well this album is the way you would have expressed it if it were 1986 and you just happened to be a master musician who could write moody lyrics, and really stereotypical poetry. This would be it. This would be your song to play on your shitty stereo while you mourned all sorts of problems, and recalled all sorts of beautiful experiences.
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[Audio:http://www.seattlesubsonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/04-graveyard-girl-1.mp3]
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The Builders & The Butchers (Dec. 11)
The Builders and The Butchers, Portland via Anchorage’s form of story telling folk can be quite captivating – intense to say the least. The band was recently awarded Willamette Week’s best new band, a prestige that has been bestowed to bands such as Talkdemonic, The Shaky Hands, and Menomena, and they are certainly deserving of it. Poised to contend for the current pinnacle of the Northwest staple of story driven folk akin to The Decemberists, or even Neutral Milk Hotel, The Builders and The Butchers weave compelling dramas into their music, focusing on storylines involving the typical terrors of folk music; gallows, dancing with demons, bottoms of lakes, slow trains, and the like, but without seeming contentious, trite, or even like they are imitating a tried and true method. The Builders and The Butchers take on intricate, banjo driven folk is completely fresh. The absolute conviction of this band live is a sight to behold – and completely amazing.
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You can witness all this Thursday night Dec 11th, at the Showbox when The Builders and The Butchers play with Amanda Palmer and The Danger Ensemble. Which is an equally, though different, interesting form of folk pop that recalls a burnt out version of a former pop hit rattling around an old radio, they’re all songs you’ve heard before, but you never knew their name, and you could never remember how they went, but man, were they stuck in you head for days. That’s the best way to describe the music, but certainly doesn’t touch on the videos or book that go along so nicely with the music. And that doesn’t even touch on her work with the Dresden Dolls. Zoe Keating also performs.
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Thursday December 11
Amanda Palmer and The Danger Ensemble
The Builders and The Butchers
Zoe Keating
Doors at 8
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Bottom of The Lake - Builders and the Butchers
[audio:http://www.seattlesubsonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/19-bottom-of-the-lake.mp3]
Leeds United – Amanda Palmer
[audio:http://www.seattlesubsonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/04-leeds-united.mp3]
of Skeletal Lamping, of Sunlandia, of Montreal
of Montreal just got back from Sunlandia, they’d been there many times, and brought back many enchanting, orchestrated, pop songs to document their travels across this parallel world. Except this parallel world is all locked down inside Kevin Barnes’ head, or maybe Georgie Fruit’s. Confused yet? Don’t be, it is what it is, except it, it’s of Montreal, and it’s great.
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of Montreal was (is?) part of a second wave of performers to be born out of Atlanta Georgia’s Elephant 6 Collective, which also includes Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples in Stereo, Elf Power, and the Music Tapes, along with many more amazing fuzzed out folk/pop bands to whom many diverse genres of music now owe some type of imminent homage and definite respect. The band began as a lo-fi aesthetic pop group that bordered on folk, dealing exclusively with semi-autobiographical psychedlia, but since the early to mid 2000’s has shifted to being an electronic-glam-pop outlet for Kevin Barnes’ (The primary entity behind of Montreal, though his alternate personas have been creeping in lately…) concerns and experiences involving various not so pop-y subject matter, including family problems, depression, and introversion, all with a sugary sheen of production value and impeccable melodies.
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The show started out with noise rock quartet HEALTH, who sounds like a dial up modem multiplied by punk rock and mild hipster stardom, in the best, and most obvious way possible. Characterized by atonal, heavily affected guitars and blasting drums, the band was well received by the crowd, but seemed like a strange opener for an act like of Montreal. With only one album worth of material, and of which most people would only remember Crystal Castle’s remix of “Crimewave”, the band opted to, in keeping with their style, play incredibly loud, vaguely melodic drone music, which was not in keeping with of Montreal’s style or fan base at all. Regardless it was entertaining and the band was obviously into it, which is always a plus for me. At this point I was psyched.
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