My nine favorite albums of the year, in no particular order:
Modest Mouse Good News For People Who Like Bad News
You’ve heard enough about “Float On.” The best song on the rock album of the year is “Black Cadillacs.” Isaac Brock’s voice bears an eerie whisper as he pleads the opening lines: “And it’s true we named our children/ After towns that we’d never been to/ And it’s true that the clouds just hung around/ Like black Cadillacs outside of a funeral.” Then Brock and Co. explode in sarcastic reproach, letting the madmen inside seep out, just as they’re prone to do. “Black Cadillacs” moves between sarcastic anger and lucid calm: the results of either fighting through a negative view of life or learning to love it despite its absurdity. Brock’s optimism is hard-won (his band’s driven a hell of a rough road in its long history) and I trust it. America may have chosen the wrong president, but we chose the right rock album.
Interpol Antics
Underneath Interpol’s vivid atmospherics and intricate instrumental interplay, Antics is really the cheesy love song album of the year. It’s as if Paul Banks knew his band was good enough instrumentally that he could get away with shoot-me-in-the-face lyrics like, “Let me celebrate the myriad ways in which I love you.” But he was right; the fact that his lyrics are so corny only adds to the overall impression of the thing. Because the album is so complete a statement, so riveting and musically rich and yet so unselfconscious and lyrically intimate, it overcomes you, almost involuntarily. A hundred bands are as musically imposing as Interpol; another hundred as arresting lyrically — but very, very few others are both.
The Arcade Fire Funeral
If Modest Mouse proved in 2004 that honest-to-god indie rock could have mainstream success, the Arcade Fire’s Funeral proved that that genre’s best was still far from it. Win Butler and his band give misery a good name on Funeral, which somehow both wallows in and transcends the death of three of the bandmember’s relatives. Over gritty guitars and a strangely 19th-century atmosphere, Butler wails through stories about maturity, heartbreak and, of course, death. If it sounds overwhelmingly negative (and how could it not), hold your judgment: Butler’s band answers sorrow with triumph, balancing his despairingly hopeful lyrics with grand, even dancey, instrumental rock heights, as energetic and inspiring as death is final.
Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand
Eleven songs, none of which are disappointing.
The Fiery Furnaces Blueberry Boat
The most fun album I heard this year is also the weirdest. Eleanor and David Freidburger take the psycho-journey-blues feel of the group’s original album and flesh it out into a full-on sea opera, like Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before The Mast” if Lou Reed was captain. The Furnaces ramble, both lyrically and musically, but the imposing size of Blueberry Boat — 12 tracks of continuous, absurd narrative — is countered by the fact that something new happens every damn second, and you’ve probably never heard anything like it. A fuzzy wah-wah guitar runs circles around a rolling piano, building to a march that’s saturated the next second by a rich organ just before the whole thing falls back into a Stones-y rock moment — all while Eleanor sings crazy lines like “Mocked up with silk strings and taffeta tricked/ With nails out of driftwood already iron sicked/ Now spy out the glass at whatever missteps me/ And the press gang’s warrant signed Sir Edward Pepsi.” It could have been boring and self-consciously arty, but the psychedelic swashbuckler motif fits perfectly.
Les Savy Fav Inches
A set of nine two-song EPs compiled into a classic post-punk full-length? A riotous band of musical misfits, famously fronted by a fat, bearded and vertically challenged Satan look-alike? Les Savy Fav finally captured the notorious intensity of their live performance on tape, and this incredible collection is the result. Working chronologically backwards, Inches begins with Les Savy Fav’s more contained recent work and devolves into a violent ruckus from there. They channel old Joy Division, snag the Gang of Four throne and beat the Liars with sharp, minimalist precision. This is our punk.
TV on the Radio Desperate Youth, Thirsty Babes
TV on the Radio made the most radical statement in pop music this year. Desperate Youth sounds like nothing else: Gigantic, pulsating bass is the most dominant accompaniment to Tunde Adebimpe’s soulful wail. Building songs like this, with guitar and drums adding peripheral spice to high vocals and a low, loud rumble, melting into hooks instead of stepping into them, TV on the Radio create a radical new instrumental aesthetic while bringing more traditional, virtuosic vocals back to rock music. It’s far from perfect, especially near the end, but TV on the Radio’s first full length is the most revolutionary artistic statement in pop music this year.
The Streets A Grand Don’t Come For Free
Mike Skinner is a freaking weirdo. His whole new album seems to be about his cell phone running out of batteries, some girl playing with her hair in a bar, or some other equally insignificant detail of life. But Skinner’s made a fantastic hip-hop concept record with a story that’s really about finding out how much the little things in life can set you back if you don’t appreciate and hang on to them. Skinner blasts exhaustively detailed, awkwardly British rhymes over his trademark choppy cheese beats, which stagger dry drum sounds around samples of everything from Wagner to cheesy ’80s adult-pop. Sort of like Eminem — the pasty Skinner often slant-rhymes over extremely sparse beats — except his stories are about learning to deal with life, instead of lashing out at those who gave it.
Comets on Fire Blue Cathedral
Comets on Fire are my kind of geniuses. They smoke a lot of weed, play music because they want to (rather than because they get paid to) and turn out brilliant, psychedelic-rock masterpieces like Blue Cathedral. Comets on Fire write songs by turning everything — including a crazy, space-noise-inducing artifact from the ’60s called an Echoplex — to the highest volume, and letting that shit wail. The eight almost completely instrumental tracks on their latest album bristle with bulgy stoner-rock powerchording and tease out into moments of transcendent, trippy serenity. Vocalist Ethan Miller commits some frantic (and vague) howling to a few tracks, but Comets on Fire prefer to let their instruments speak, through improvised jams that explore every nuance of the rhythm and chord progression. This is bebop for the Nirvana generation, and, for the record, my favorite album of 2004.
