My favorite records of 2005

[Thank you for waiting for this. It's taken me quite a while, it probably didn't turn out the way I wanted, but I had fun doing it. I hope you enjoy.]


Lists documenting the top albums of the year are always a bit sketchy. After all, how’s one supposed to compare two very different things? Can you compare apples and pork tenderloin?

<>Still any critic feels a compelling need to gather everything together at the end of the year before starting afresh in 2005. Rankings are often described as the most important, best, essential, epic, mind-blowing, on and on, most attempting to presume some sort of mathematical formula for “best album”. For my purposes, I would never think you can compare one of these records to the other – art just isn’t that way. Rather, my list comprises the 25 albums I thought the most enjoyable and those that stuck in my mind the longest over the course of 2004. The list is not down to a science (even though it took me a long time). So 17 could be 12 and vice versa. These are the records I’m feeling at the end of the year.

Now, of course, there were albums that I missed. They are not listed. (What are they? Let me know.) And there are albums that didn’t make the cut, for various reasons. Some of them are compilations of old songs recorded new (Greatest Palace Music, Acoustic Citsuoca), some of them are nixed because they weren’t the best I’ve ever heard, and most because I needed to round off the list at an even number and I have time constraints. Unlike some bloggers, who have nothing but free time on their hands, I do work. I also didn’t want a top 47 albums of 2004.

So – without further a due, please enjoy my top 25 albums of 2004.

25. Of Montreal – Satanic Panic in the Attic – Polyvinyl

Of the Elephant 6 collective, Of Montreal always stuck out as the one band flying much too high on Zoloft and mushrooms – a lethal dose that usually wore thin by an album’s end, unable to keep up with its own giddiness and ADHD. On this year’s Satanic Kevin Barnes and company finally streamlined their hyperactivity tendencies into fluid songs and wrote their mainstream (circa 1969 San Fran, of course) masterpiece. The album is a blast, full of fuzzy guitars, bubbling synths, handclaps and restrained, but sugar-sweet melodies. Satanic is perfect pop music accessible to any generation, perfect for any era, no matter how nostalgic it wants to sound or you want to make it.

24. Air – Talkie Walkie – Astralwerks

And so we may once again breathe sexy life back into the dull, dusty world of lounge. After too many Ibiza Chill Out compilations, it almost seems supernatural of the Frenchmen to sweep down and rescue us from mediocrity all while making us moist. I also love that this is a soft rock album marketed as electro/indie-cool. Must have the Avants up in arms.<>

23. Growing – The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light – Kranky

This is a spectral record, bright with pinks, purples, and yellows, but smart enough to use white (and black) light, and hot enough to singe your ears. “Onement” has an ebb and flow of drone (from guitar and bass? Oh, nein!) floating so gently overtop, until you’re pummeled by cymbal and set up for a brainmelt in “Anaheim II”. I never thought Sunn O))) could/would play Windy & Carl songs!

22. Kanye West – College Dropout – Roc-A-Fella

There’s not much more that I can say about this album that hasn’t been written and rewritten all year. But a cocksure, self-conscious MC/DJ? Fucking sweet. Never thought I’d see the duality of man exemplified in a rapper. The songs are good too.

21. Sonic Youth – Sonic Nurse – Geffen

I asked for this record in a DC record store, visiting my girlfriend. The plump record store guy took me into the makeshift listening room, put on “Pattern Recognition” and started studying my face for traces of emotion. Couldn’t help but smile amidst his “sounds like apples if oranges had lemons babies!!!” Nope: disgruntled guitar smack pissed off and complacent simultaneously, whiny neon valley girl vocals from Kim, dreamy hot-guy vocals from Thurston, tuff noise stains, on, on, on. Another great Sonic Youth record.

20. Tom Waits – Real Gone – Anti-

Weird belchy blooze, another swift left turn for Mr. Waits. Making the most of the mouth, this record gets rid them bossy drum kits. Sounding like it was recorded by some insomniac down the hallway, Waits gives us some full-flavored late night admissions, complaints and tall tales that never sound so sweet, seductive and scary. This is garage rock – guitars all covered in oil, vocals choked on carbon monoxide, built out of scrap metal.

19. Jack Rose – Raag Manifestations – VHF

Rising above the chaotic fingerpicking of Mr. Rose’s Octopus Hand is the sweet, sweet sound of melancholic bliss – a wonderfully hopeful sadness. He plays fast, fierce yet serenely at the same time – I’ve never heard anything quite like it. Jack Rose is an unbelievably great talent set on transcending the listener’s experience of both middle-eastern and American folk guitar music. As organic and breathtaking as daybreak.

18. Sightings – Arrived in Gold – Load

Not nearly the furiously bloody Michigan Haters, and thank goodness (panic attack). NYC’s Sightings have taken a step back – there’s actually space here, not the full bore, senses assault noise of previous efforts. We get still get that freaky shit, just more time to think about it: rusted razor-wire strung guitars gagged and shoved in a wah pedal, bass played inside the cabinet with exposed electric wires buzzing at 10,000 Volts threatening to electrocute (you can hear them), and drums like pistons pumping black rotten blood, not oil/cymbals made from ban saws. This is Metal, Son.

17. TV on the Radio – Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes – Touch & Go

The amazing thing that I keep forgetting about this album is how seductive a simple song can be. Most of the songs off of DYBTB are nothing really more than a 4-note fuzz-bass line and a drum machine. But, FUCK, this is some dank, dirty dog shit. Them gettin all funky and sweaty to some doo-wop! They hot like that barbershop shit dawg! Takin the breath out my chest! Soul music never really left, but its back.

16. Interpol – Antics – Matador

No need to elaborate on this one, you’ve all heard this before even if you haven’t. Midnight pop music for the city Gotham.

15. 90 Day Men – Panda Park – Southern

Never have I seen cover art so perfectly fit a band’s sound. This band freaks me out with how right on they were with their field + pink flowers + acid-drop sky. The music is at once pastoral, naturally sculpted and psychedelic in the best late 60’s, early 70’s sense of the word. The music is prog, but is at once fluid and poppy, not strenuous, over-bearing or pretentious. Space music – needs to be tech-savvy to get up there, but once it does: zero gravity.

14. Liars – They Were Wrong So We Drowned – Mute

Worlds different than their debut, They Threw Us All In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, this concept album about witches was fucking gonzo. Ramshackle instrumentation, organically forming in Northern New Jersey finally stabbed dance-punk in the bleeding heart. The songs are all dark and gloomy and don’t stand alone well—except for the jam “There’s Always Room on the Broom”. That shit was hott. The parallels to a modern-day witch hunt are obvious, but no one went as far. Some gloomy, scary stuff in here.<>

13. The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come For Free – Vice

I never thought I’d want to hear this album. Some honky yapping about the most banal parts of the day over beats jacked outta what sounds like 1996. But Mike Skinner’s unbelievable storytelling is the key here. He makes the most boring the most important, cause it is, when its happening. A wonderful story of conflict, self-questioning, vice, love, love lost, and redemption. Books on tape.

12. The Futureheads – The Futureheads – Sire

I question the fact that there’s a better power-pop album that came out all year (I didn’t hear The Slow Wonder.) Undeniable 3-part harmonies are the captain driving this cigarette boat right through the swimming area. Guitars are the fuel, going 100 miles only to stop on a dime. Everything here seems to be going in a different direction, but came together so damn perfectly. Undoubtedly one of the best singles record of the year, could’ve been released in 1982, but wasn’t. I can’t wait to see this band live. If you haven’t heard it check: “A to B”, “Decent Days & Nights”, “The City is Here For You to Use” and “Hounds of Love”, but listen to it all if you can.

11. Joanna Newsom – The Milk-Eyed Mender – Drag City

Another great acoustic folk records coming out this year. Newsom’s voice is one of the strangest, best things to ever happen to music. Part 12-year-old innocent, part scary 80-year-old mystic, it never fails to color her collection of lush, organic, harp-driven songs. Close to being the most human record I’ve ever heard – it takes a heartless bastard to not well up with emotion at the sound of “The Sprout and the Bean”.

10. Animal Collective – Sung Tongs – Paw Tracks

After people heard last year’s Hear Comes the Indian everyone expected big things. But probably not a sunny California drum-circle freak out. Sung Tongs came out of left-field from a band I thought was going further underground, indulging pop-sensibilities with avant-psychedelia so charming you turn gay. The Animal Collective stowed their fluorescent electronics and picked up acoustics to make music flowing like water showing all its power, expansiveness, life, uncertainty, and fascinating beauty. [Panda Bear’s Young Prayer was excellent too – I didn’t listen to it enough though.]

9. Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Like Bad News – Epic

Ok. Mr. Brock stopped being depressed? Not really. The music got more accessible? Not much. Modest Mouse had a hit record? What? How this happened, I’ll never understand. Granted, “Float On” is a rock-solid song, should’ve always been on modern-rock radio. But it still makes no sense. Is the world getting it? This record for all its semi-optimism finally makes me think that it’ll be ok, we’re not all that dumb. It’s a record, like Emergency & I before it, that deals with maturity and acceptance – something everyone can get down with every once and a while. America may not be changing too much, but at least we got a sweet record on the radio because of it.

8. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti 2 – The Doldrums – Paw Tracks

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats wrote that this record was “re-encrusting the diamond.” As hard as I can think, I can’t come up with a better way to say what this sounds like. The songs sound exactly like they came out of a dream – I’ve heard them: they’re 80’s roller rink slow songs, 70’s lite disco pop, muzak, something familiar but so distant. I don’t know how fucked up Ariel Pink is, how much of a genius he is, but its damn scary how perfectly he nailed a soundtrack everyone’s heard but no one owns. Every song is covered in layers of bad production, detuned guitars, ghetto Casios and choppy structure, but shining through is the work of an unbelievable songwriter ruining my late nights.

7. Brian Wilson – Smile – Nonesuch

For a record that birthed an entire indie label, Elephant 6, the hype and expectation surrounding Smile had to be huge. Was it going to be weird, avant music? It’s a teenage symphony to God – is it going to be (gasp) Christian? Is it going to be nothing what it should have been now that its 37 years later? Is it going to be bad? Put the record on and suddenly all those questions disappear. Brian Wilson’s got his shit together, can still sing like a bird, and can put a song, make that record, together like no one in rock music has ever been capable of doing. Is this the way Smile was really envisioned back in the day? Hell if I know, but if this is it, it sounds great to me.

6. Devendra Banhart – Rejoicing in the Hands & Nino Rojo – Young God

The gypsy guitar ballads contained on these volumes are all the resin these ears need to get stoned. Psychedelic folk music has never sounded so fluent and organic – Mr. Banhart has an undeniable gift for the cerebrally comforting. His voice is another strange mixture, this time a crow and man, but succeeds better than anything in conveying the universal message in singing a song about teeth or spiders. His songs are meant to send you onto a different plane, but still keep you grounded in the fascination with the natural beauty of music. “At the Hop”, by the way, is one of the best singles released all year: a beautiful tune about returning home, even if you can’t.

5. Comets On Fire – Blue Cathedral – Sub Pop

For all the psych music I listened to this year, no one made as cohesive a statement as Comets On Fire’s Blue Cathedral. The album starts out like any good rock album should: threatening to tear your tits off. But real sly-like, the Comets stop every once and a while stroke your inner thigh. It’s a perfect album: hott riffs, damp, spacey lows, and mind-bending psychedelic guitar willing to takeoff or float you along at its will. You have no say at this record’s mercy. The Comets take their cues from all good things psych: tye-dyes and bellbottoms, 70’s prog, Sabbath, Haight-Ashbury acid tests, heavy metal, Inna-Gadda-Da-Vidda organs, caterwauling vocals, echo, echo, echo. For anyone that has ever taken a bong hit: this is the dank shit.

4. Madvillain – Madvillainy – Stones Throw

Often times collaborations fail. Something about the star power or egos of two (or more) people colliding usually leads to underdeveloped, but promising things. Fortunately, none of that is even remotely seen here. There’s no overshadowing, there’s no dominant force and there’s virtually no failure here at all. What could have been a huge swing and a miss for hip-hop turns into a sexy new step in the right direction for all music. At first we get the prerequisite warm up (“The Illest Villains”) followed by the unreal one-two of “Accordion” and, my favorite, “Meat Grinder” (dig that fat bass thunder, guitar slides and tipsy percussion). Madlib’s beats are mostly taken from lost jazz and soul looking through an outer space lens, perfectly fitting MF Doom’s “buttery flow”. Listen to this one: no one can put words together like Doom can (“Whip up a slice of nice verse pie/Hit it on the first try/Villain/The worst guy”), and no one’s ever been ever to sonically match that flow as well as Madlib has here.

3. Iron & Wine – Our Endless Numbered Days – Sub Pop

Sam Beam plays simple American folk music that could’ve been written at any time. Its sound is lost in time. His voice sounds like it’s covered in dust. He’s an everyman that sings of the world he sees in the terms he sees it. His music is birthed in the South, but doesn’t just exist there. Mr. Beam isn’t reinventing anything with Our Endless Numbered Days. But he is creating the most beautiful music I’ve heard all year. His songs are about God, our land, family, escaping, death. Oh. And love.

2. The Arcade Fire – Funeral – Merge

Who hasn’t written about this record? I’m at a loss for words, for trying to say something new. After all every damn website has an opinion on this “emotional masterpiece”. You all know the back story, where the band is from, how well they’re doing, etc. So what more can I say? In truth, I don’t want to write about this. For me, it’s an amazing record that everyone should hear. Something that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck every time you hear it. This is the record that got you excited about music in the first place.

1. Wilco – A Ghost Is Born – Nonesuch

Maybe I missed the boat this year. Maybe this was an album of undercooked ideas with grand ideas. Maybe they shouldn’t have started with such a slow song. Maybe Wilco had their day in the sun, its time to turn to something new. Maybe they’re not the great indie hope. Maybe they’re too all over the place for their own good. Maybe they’re not perfect. Maybe Jay Bennett was integral to the band. Maybe they should stick to what they were good at: pop songs, not 10 minutes of noise.

Pretty much all I heard this year about this album can be summed up in “it’s not as good as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. No, no it’s not. But it isn’t YHF. It isn’t striving to be YHF. It’s striving to be something so completely different.

A Ghost Is Born is a beast of an album. It’s too big, its erratic, its heavy-handed, sometimes its too light, etc., etc. But one thing you can’t deny: it’s wholly American. Like the proverbial melting-pot that America was supposed to be, Wilco have taken every influence from every place they could find, distilled and poured it into a single disc of music. Like all strange and amazing American art it’s hard to define, it doesn’t make immediate sense, it doesn’t fit in with a scheme, there is no resolution. No matter: the sheer largeness of this album will influence for decades. It will continue to inspire people to create, to challenge, to expand, to further everything and anything we know. Boundaries have been set; an album like Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born will continue to push those boundaries illogically and without warning. It will scare us, thrill us and put us in our place.

And for that, I am thankful.