In Which "Pieces of Me" Flirts With Relevance-- 2k4's Top 10 Albums, And So On
Jan 02 '05
The Bottom Line The Bottom Line can finally rest its head on something real and likes the way that feels.
There's something telling about the state of things in the fact that the majority of 2004's handful of truly excellent films (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill Volume 2, Hero, The Incredibles, and so on) probes the implications of selective memory in the creation of personal identity. It isn't especially pleasant to realize that it's impossible to like, let alone to trust, our friends and neighbors without first confronting the things we don't like or trust about ourselves. Would that more than just a select few filmmakers had been able to parlay that disquiet into legitimately great art.
Fortunately, recording artists had no such trouble in 2004, and nearly all of the year's best albums support at least some degree of critical analysis as works that intensely explore their creators' artistic identity. For veteran artists, this frequently meant that new recordings demanded that earlier works be revisited and reevaluated-- to choose the most obvious example, it seems impossible to deny the genius of Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose if one understands what it represents in contrast to everything else she's ever recorded. For established or still-emerging artists, these explorations often resulted in entirely new perspectives on career arcs-- where does Modest Mouse go now that they've started to move away from Isaac Brock's misanthropic streak? Where does Wilco get off in dropping an album that couldn't be a less intuitive follow-up to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? And for the year's many promising newcomers, it was all the more essential to make a clear statement of identity, lest you get lost among the also-rans.
The year's best-selling debut, for better or worse, was Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography. Coincidence? I personally hope so, but maybe not.
So it's a trend that extended, in some degree, even to artistically weak commercial successes-- Avril Lavigne surprised no one by revealing that there isn't anything going on behind her eyeliner, Gretchen Wilson used a subtly disguised misogyny to break into Nashville's boys' club and simultaneously positioned herself as something of a feminist icon for having done so, Lindsay Lohan titled her debut album Speak despite not having anything the least bit interesting to say, and, well, Lenny Kravitz took a flat-iron to his hair and was as still as insipid as ever. So it should be said that self-reflection alone doesn't give an album weight, nor does it inscribe a sociopolitical relevance. But, on many albums in 2004, artists moved beyond typical navel-gazing in a way that legitimized the term "artist" in the first place.
Aside: I've excised from this list the albums, with the previously mentioned exception, that will eventually be included in a separate list of the year's best country albums. That said, each album under discussion is no less than a solid 4 star effort, so the effects of doing so on overall list quality are really negligible.
Having thrown a bit of self-critique of my own into the prefatory material, then...
The Top 10 (Technically 12) Albums of 2004:
10. Blueberry Boat, The Fiery Furnaces. Rough Trade. // Thunder, Lightning, Strike, The Go! Team, Memphis Industries.
A pair of albums with little to nothing in common other than the fact that I like them quite a bit but would never actually recommend that anyone else go out and buy either of them, Blueberry Boat and Thunder, Lightning, Strike represent two extremes to which the alt-pop genre can be taken. While The Fiery Furnaces' stock and trade are experimental, classically inspired arrangements that don't so much subvert conventional pop song structures as they ignore those conventions entirely, The Go! Team's brand of sample-heavy hooks actively court Name! That! Influence! comparisons. The results are that Blueberry Boat, with its tracks that boast of distinct "movements" that allow the songs to be completely reshuffled and reformatted when performed live, sounds like nothing else in modern popular music, while Thunder, Lightning, Strike is best nailed down specifically as the score to a Quentin Tarantino directed film adaptation of Knight Rider. Blueberry Boat is an album whose scope and technique I admire in a very academic sense, though it isn't an album I listen to often because it truly demands the kind of active attention that simply can't be given while driving. Thunder, Lightning, Strike is an album I enjoy, though I can't listen to it in one sitting because it's aggressively happy to the point of distraction. The problem with this unlistenability arises in the knowledge that each album in some way embodies everything I believe pop music should be. And, while part of me finds this conflict exhilarating, it's what keeps me from telling other people they should seek out these albums. This, despite my having included them on my year-end best-of list. So the conflict continues unabated.
09. Dig a Hole in That Substrate And Tell Me What You See, Jim White. Luaka Bop.
What's so refreshing about Jim White's Dig A Hole... is that it renders the highly specialized genre labels like "freak-folk" or "electroclash" or "grime" so prevalent in the alternative rock press meaningless by ignoring the conventions of genres both wide (country, adult alternative) and refined (trip-hop, americana jazz, space-folk). While the production on Dig a Hole... is varied-- White enlists a range of high-profile collaborators from Aimee Mann to The Sadies over the course of these songs-- though still uniformly sophisticated, the album's ultimate focus is on White's skill as a songwriter of unique scope and vision. The ability to write an album of songs that average over five minutes in length but which never once threaten to overstay their welcome is a rare gift. Rarer still is the ability to invite comparisons to countless other artists (Sparklehorse? Grandaddy? John Vanderslice? Tom Waits?) and not have a single one come even remotely close. What's most important to know is that White has a sound entirely his own and that he digs deep and is unafraid to report what he finds. And that killer title is just the topsoil.
08. Rubber Factory, The Black Keys. Alive.
Packing a far heavier visceral punch than any other 2004 release, the third album from The Black Keys is this noisy, raw thing that's all alcohol and hormones, a twenty-one year-old on the back end of his first night out in a biker bar. In other words, it's a classic rock album in the making. While stylistically similar The White Stripes strive toward more openly academic goals, The Black Keys' talents are more immediate. They infuse their straight-up rock with modern blues so skillfully that they push the boundaries of both in a way that no band since Led Zeppelin has done. But that's something they did on their previous releases, as well, and Rubber Factory surpasses both The Big Come Up and Thickfreakness because of The Black Keys' newfound confidence with what they do. On Rubber Factory, they're willing to incorporate novel elements-- the blistering steel guitar on "The Lengths" seems like a dare to Robert Randolph, and a cover of The Kinks' "Act Nice And Gentle" resolves into a deft honky-tonk anthem-- into their simple formula that succeeds just fine on its own but which is all the better for their loss of inhibition.
07. You Are The Quarry, Morrissey. Attack. // Medulla, Bjork. Atlantic.
Divisive albums both, Morrissey's comeback, You Are The Quarry, and Bjork's Medulla are linked in their dependence on two key factors: the strengths of the two artists' voices and, more significantly, on how intrinsically interesting any given listener finds their public personae. Like so many of the year's best albums, both You Are The Quarry and Medulla demand an active re-evaluation of one's views of the artists behind them. The idea of Bjork turning intensely inward and stripping away nearly all instrumentation is only a successful one for those already fascinated by Bjork and who have acquired the taste for that not-of-this-earth voice of hers. If its very concept smacks of artistic self-indulgence, the subtle pleasures unearthed on Medulla absolve Bjork of any real sin. It's eccentric and profoundly personal, but hardly moreso than her previous output. The truest departure of form on Medulla, then, is that Bjork has chosen to draw attention to those elements.
Morrissey, on the other hand, has turned an aversion to the deeply personal into the foundation of his career-- it's with the utmost caution that any of his first-person songs, however intimate their details, should be read as autobiographical. Which makes the songs Morrissey wrote for You Are The Quarry all the more demanding. You Are The Quarry undeniably feels like the most personal album of Morrissey's career-- "First of the Gang to Die" supposedly a shout-out to his sizable Hispanic fanbase, "You Know I Couldn't Last" a perils-of-fame number on the defensive against would-be critics-- but, since it's a Morrissey album, its most incisive self-analysis must still be approached with skepticism. What ultimately gives Morrissey away, then, is his voice. At no other point in his career has Morrissey been so evocative a singer; in fact, no album of 2004 is as gorgeously sung as You Are The Quarry. If the strings on torch ballad "Come Back to Camden" swell to insincere heights, the break in Morrissey's voice at the song's climax nonetheless rings true. You Are The Quarry is the sprawling, auto-critical pop masterpiece Robbie Williams-- brilliant in small doses, but unable to sustain an entire album to this point-- keeps trying to create. That Morrissey, more than two decades into his career, was the one to record it really shouldn't be as surprising as it is.
06. The Disconnection, Carina Round. Interscope.
"Dean of Rock Critics" Robert Christgau gave The Disconnection his dreaded "bomb" rating and dismissed the album with a single throwaway line-- "The Kate Bush of PJ Harvey." I'd likely replace "Kate Bush" with either "Jeff Buckley" or "Tori Amos," but, even as is, I can't for the life in me see how that description is meant to be disparaging. Her lyrics skew occasionally into Fiona Apple gone awry territory-- there's a line about "thought beams" that, good as the rest of the album is, I just can't abide-- and her production recalls a hybrid of Harvey with Choirgirl-era Amos. Her lyrics and her production, however, aren't Round's selling points. First off, there's her voice, this ginormous force-of-nature of incomparable range and expression. Beth Hart is the only female rock singer who's better, and, if no one could hope to match Hart's raw nerve endings, Round is just getting started. More startling than her voice, then, is the extent to which a songwriter so young understands the relationship between a song's structural composition and its larger thematic purpose. The songs on The Disconnection stutter and spit and entirely change their direction with such abandon that it's impossible ever to feel entirely comfortable-- I've heard few things as out-and-out creepy as the "la la la" chant in the background of lead single "Into My Blood"-- listening to the album unfold. Which couldn't be more fitting for an album that explores a state of disease. Far more than just the sum of its clear influences, The Disconnection is nonetheless the year's best PJ Harvey album, challenging but still beautiful.
05. A Ghost is Born, Wilco. Nonesuch.
If there's truth to the idea that Wilco is the new Radiohead-- a loaded comparison probably worth pages of discussion on its own-- then A Ghost is Born is the Kid A to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's Ok, Computer. Already the subject of considerable critical revision-- the reversal of opinion from "Genius!" to "Bloated and Pretentious!" happened so quickly that I'm surprised most rock critics haven't spent the remainder of the year wearing neck braces-- A Ghost is Born presents such a dilemma because it isn't an album made for any audience in particular. It isn't meant to impress critics, nor is it meant to please the countless fans won over by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's breakthrough. Instead, it's a concept album of the purest sort, its thesis statement made even by its packaging. Both individual tracks and the album as a whole repeatedly cycle from beauty to chaos and back, and it's a testament to Wilco's confidence as a band, and to a refreshing confidence in their listeners even, that they never clearly delineate exactly what constitutes either extremity of sound. At turns abrasive and off-putting, A Ghost is Born still emerges as Wilco's most compelling album. They've never taken more risks-- two of the album's twelve tracks exceed nine minutes-- nor been as deeply rewarding. 2004 was not a year that rewarded challenge, but A Ghost is Born is such exceptional work that it's only a matter of time until it returns to its initial and rightful favor.
04. Funeral, The Arcade Fire. Merge.
As dense and richly rewarding as any debut since Exile in Guyville, The Arcade Fire's Funeral benefits from a creation mythology that rivals Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in terms of its impact on the album's ultimate critical reception, and it allows Win Butler and wife Régine Chassagne to displace Jack and Meg White as rock's most progressive powercouple. That the album's genesis is steeped in death certainly gives weight to its meditations on the often paralyzing fear inherent in facing true adulthood for the first time, and it even accounts for the album's occasional lyrical mis-steps-- few words belong in song lyrics less than "eyelids," but it shows up twice on Funeral in lines that would make a high school freshman blush-- as a juvenile awkwardness. What ultimately makes Funeral so powerful, though, is not that it dwells on such difficult topics as death and fear, but that, despite those greater thematic elements, it's an album characterized by a clear-eyed optimism. Like the best elegies, it's an album that finds cause for celebration even when confronted by grief.
03. Franz Ferdinand. Domino.
The album whose inclusion on this list at all, let alone its perch at a lofty #3, is the most likely to damage whatever street cred I might have had otherwise, Franz Ferdinand ends 2004 as the latest album to fall victim to its own good press. It isn't an album I apologize for finding great, but it's a position I nonetheless feel obligated to contextualize. I got to Franz Ferdinand early: I picked it up in late March or early April, when there was but a whisper of buzz about it in the US and well before the hype became its eventual deafening roar. So I was able to take the album, to a certain extent, at face value, not having heard any of its tracks before buying it and knowing only that I dug the band's name and packaging enough to pay $8.99 for it. Had I known what waited, I would've gladly paid double.
It's a comparison I made in discussing "Take Me Out" as a single, but it's a comparison that bears repeating: Franz Ferdinand, once the intro to "Jacqueline" gives way to the song's driving bass line, gives modern rock its own Blondie. Which is precisely what modern rock, having been overrun with a suffocating self-seriousness, needed most in 2004. A band-- an exceptionally tight, polished band, at that-- unafraid to make people dance just a little. And, in that regard, Franz Ferdinand, song for song, is arguably more successful in following through on its mission statement than is any other album this year. If none would top "Take Me Out," every song on the album could be released as a single. Would that other rock albums-- The Killers' Hot Fuss, to choose but one example of many possible-- boasted such an embarrassment of riches.
Would I feel this way had I not heard Franz Ferdinand until, say, October? I'd like to think so-- as one of maybe five people in the US who thinks Sideways is a horribly-written film given depth only by its exceptional acting, it's not as though I'm without precedent for ignoring larger critical trends-- but I can't say for certain. What I can say, however, is that I love Franz Ferdinand in precisely the way that I've always wanted to love The Strokes but never really could, since the world was already "over" Is This It? long before it ever hit the shelves, and that part of me actively resents the rock press for robbing so many other people of the chance to approach Franz Ferdinand (and Is This It?, while we're at it) in the same way.
02. Van Lear Rose, Loretta Lynn. Interscope.
Fully forty years-- her debut album was released in 1964-- into a career that had already earned her deserved status as a legendary figure in popular music, Loretta Lynn finally released an album on which she sounds comfortable. Certainly, a great deal of the credit for this goes to Lynn herself, with her trademark wit and candor still fully intact and her voice still more powerful at 69 than that of any of the imitators she's spawned. But what ultimately makes Van Lear Rose such a landmark album is the production job by Jack White. His authenticity fetish occasionally results in over-reaching-- the less said about anything to do with Cold Mountain, the better, and none of The White Stripes' albums succeed fully under the Dogme95 style restrictions he places on himself and Meg-- but, by producing an album for an artist whose "correct" sound matches his stripped-down aesthetic, he's managed to come up with an album that stands as career-best work for both himself and for the woman he's called "America's greatest songwriter."
If not quite as effortless as the best of Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn's songwriting remains among the most powerful and distinctive in any genre of modern popular music. She's fearless and aggressive, and the debt today's best female artists (PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Liz Phair, et al)-- and the best male artists, for that matter-- owe to Loretta Lynn is incalculable. But what makes her most well-known songs so endlessly intriguing is that they're all rooted in a fundamental conflict when it comes to their production. For much of her career, Lynn was produced by Owen Bradley, the man who defined Patsy Cline's signature sound, and other producers of Nashville's "countrypolitan" era. So, even when Lynn is singing about beating the living sh1t out of the proverbial "other woman" in songs like "Fist City," she's backed by a sound that's spit-polished and "classy" in a way that couldn't be more incongruous to her lyrical content or her vocal delivery. The genius of what Jack White does on Van Lear Rose, then-- albeit in the sense that it's such a blindingly obvious point that someone really should've picked up on it before now, but country music is far less respectful of its elders in action than in words-- is that he pairs a rootsy, bare-bones production to Lynn's rough-and-tumble material.
That Van Lear Rose plays as something of an autobiography undersells the extent to which Lynn both gets her own celebrity persona and is willing to toy with that persona. While "Miss Being Mrs." is an absolutely devastating, intensely personal first-person reaction to the loss of her husband of 47 years, songs like "Mad Mrs. Leroy Brown" and "Family Tree" serve as a career-spanning, postmodern auto-critique. There's a shrewd intellect in Loretta Lynn's work for which she's seldom credited, if only because it's often overshadowed by her barrier-breaking tendencies. But White's production, by placing the emphasis so squarely on the exceptional set of songs Lynn wrote for the album, allows that intellect to shine through: it's the diamond in the coal she sings about on the title track, and "brilliant" just doesn't do it justice.
01. SMiLE, Brian Wilson. Nonesuch.
Worth the wait of three decades? No, but what album could be?. The even-better-but-how successor to Pet Sounds it was long rumored to be? Sadly, no. Entirely successful as a teenage symphony to God? No, but Wilson's hardly a teenager, so the question is somewhat unfair. Better than the various bootlegs and compilations put together by the die-hard contingent over the years? Probably not. Still the best album of 2004 by an almost impossible margin? And then some.
What Brian Wilson achieved with the very release of SMiLE speaks ultimately to the futility of writing about music at all-- its creation quite literally cost the man his sanity, so the implication that it is a work to be judged feels dirty and cruel-- and the actual quality of the album itself to the inadequacy of language. The superlatives at any one writer's disposal simply don't cut it, and calling SMiLE the "meticulousest" or, to borrow another, most "scrumtralescent" album in the history of popular music would be both reductive to the album and stupid of the person saying it. But there it is anyway: SMiLE is brilliant to the point that I find myself stupid in its presence. The album's thematic and stylistic coherence unparalleled, the sophistication of its compositions-- how a secondary melody from the B section of one track emerges later as a repeated theme in another track-- rivaled only by Wilson's own other works, the sheer joy of sound produced by a man no longer striving to impress any outside individuals in particular completely out of sync with the rest of modern pop... SMiLE is just about the best thing ever.
The questions it ultimately raises play out like a fascinating game of revisionist history: how many current artists would be rendered irrelevant or, at the very least, far less essential had SMiLE been released 30-odd years ago? Looking just at this list, at least half of my picks (The Arcade Fire, Wilco, Bjork, Morrissey, Jim White, The Fiery Furnaces, The Go! Team) would be hard-pressed to justify themselves, to say nothing of acts like Animal Collective or The Shins-- both of whom I like, for the record-- who owe an even more obvious debt to Brian Wilson but who sound strident in direct comparison. Timeless in the best possible sense of the word, SMiLE isn't likely to have much influence on the direction or sound of pop music, but its remarkable depth and quality provide Wilson with a second career benchmark against which everyone else will be measured.
To no one's surprise, I'm not done:
11. Showtime, Dizzee Rascal. XL
A disappointment only in the sense that its predecessor, Boy in Da Corner, was such a brilliant portrait of urban rot that no follow-up could seem adequate, so why not party, instead?
12. Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse. Epic.
At least NARAS had the good sense not to nominate them for a Best New Artist Grammy, though they'd be far more deserving, semantics aside, than anyone on that actual shortlist.
13. The Slow Wonder, A.C. Newman. Matador.
For the third time in four years, Carl Newman can claim to have his name on the year's best power-pop album. So perhaps "slow" isn't the best adjective for him to employ.
14. American Idiot, Green Day. Reprise.
As political protest statements go, it's both obvious and inarticulate. But it's an album of passion, scope, and ambition from a band no one would've ever believed capable of pulling off a rock opera nearly so well. A fully deserved critical and commercial success.
15. Scissor Sisters. Universal.
With its open reverence for the garish and the glam, Scissor Sisters plays quite a lot like the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge!, minus the skanked-up cover of "Lady Marmalade." It's gloriously trashy and uncommonly well-crafted pop and, as such, is among the most effective declarations of artistic identity in recent memory.
16. This Week, Jean Grae. Babygrande.
Armed with an impossible vocabulary, a keen observational eye, and a fascinating self-analytical streak, Grae gives hip-hop its own Loretta Lynn on the make.
17. Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey. Island.
Harvey waits for four years to follow up her most accessible album with something that works, moreso than as a single artistic statement of its own, like a greatest hits package. If that result isn't necessarily as compelling as her best recordings, Uh Huh Her is still a dense, challenging album that ultimately troubles only for a reference to Vincent Gallo.
18. The Libertines. Rough Trade.
Like The Strokes, but far heavier on the heroin and the hoyay. Alliteration (Fiery Furnaces, Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand) may have emerged in 2004 as the new plural nouns, but The Libertines stands among the best of the garage and post-garage albums.
19. The Tipping Point, The Roots. Geffen.
I won't pretend to be so well-informed about hip-hop to expound upon the greater implications of this album's title, but I know what I like. And, as far as US hip-hop is concerned, The Tipping Point conveys a sense of urgency while more successful crunk artists convey little more than hostility and volume.
20. Out of the Shadow, Rogue Wave. Sub-pop.
As intricately crafted indie-pop albums go, Out of the Shadow is better than The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow but not quite as good as Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism. As suitable soundtrack placements go, it's probably more Wicker Park than Garden State. And, yes, that's an endorsement.
21. Two-Way Monologue, Sondre Lerche. Astralwerks.
Like John Mayer, but blessed with wit, a strong compositional skill, and a lung capacity more conducive to a career as a singer. Bonus: his name is really fun to say.
22. The Heat, Jesse Malin. Artemis.
If Ryan Adams were able to record an entire album that, at some point, didn't make someone want to punch him in the face, he'd have an album that sounds a lot like The Heat.
23. Cellar Door, John Vanderslice. Barsuk.
Frank the Bunny wants this music store owner to go see Grandma Death.
24. The Concretes. Astralwerks.
A debut that arrives at the midpoint between The Supremes and Le Tigre and somehow finds an internal logic.
25. Original Sountrack, The Triplets of Belleville. Higher Octave.
Swing It Like a Belleville Triplet is the new Shake It Like a Polaroid Picture.
Notably Missed: Last Exit, Junior Boys; The Pretty Toney Album, Ghostface Killah; Fabulous Muscles, Xiu Xiu; How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, U2; The Futureheads; C'mon, Miracle, Mirah.
Notably Disliked: A Grand Don't Come for Free, The Streets; Get Away From Me!, Nellie McKay; Antics, Interpol; Mind, Body, and Soul, Joss Stone; The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom; Hot Fuss, The Killers.
The political significance of 2004 can't be minimized, and it will be interesting to see over the course of 2005 how recording artists respond to this past year. And, while introspection is prerequisite for political activity, it isn't necessarily a political statement in its own right. That 2004's best recordings seem no less timely nor essential because of their own internal politics, however, suggests that there's cause for optimism, even among those who found few reasons to smile in 2004.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
omophagia
|
|
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 142 members
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.