Gravity’s the winner

#1 Uncle Tupelo, March 16-20, 1992 (Rockville, 1992)

As others have remarked here, the less said about the top favorites, probably the better. I should also note that I wrote a paper about this album for a creative non-fiction writing class in college, and that kinda burst into flames, so will try to keep this short. This record is Uncle Tupelo’s stripped down acoustic album. Several of the tracks are covers or arrangements of traditional or country gospel songs, including standouts “Atomic Power,” “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” and “Moonshiner” This album tops my list because it was almost quite literally a friend to me during college days – it’s very melancholy, of course, and good for all the post-adolescent self-pity, but it’s also very warm and inviting. It has a bit more of a Farrar than Tweedy vibe (though that might be Wilco-influenced hindsight), but it includes my favorite tracks of Tweedy as a singer. My favorite thing about this record is its ending – after a string of mostly desperate stories, the penultimate track, “Sandusky,” a bright instrumental, offers a glimmer of real hope. The last song, though (“Wipe the Clock”) is perhaps sadder than the rest and concludes with this great couplet – “Ain’t it hard/ when the spirit doesn’t catch you?/ Gravity’s the winner / and it weighs you down” – followed by 15 seconds of wailing harmonica. Then: end of disc. It slams the door on the glimpse of hope in “Sandusky”, but it does so while the experience of hearing “Sandusky” is still vivid. This album puts hope and despair right up next to one another; we know that one of them is the literal winner, but I always think of March 16-20 as suggesting that they are just two sides of the same coin. That, and Uncle Tupelo rules.

The baffled king

#2 Jeff Buckley, Grace (Columbia, 1994)

This is surely a sign of a real character flaw, but I think that my #2 favorite of all time is also a guilty pleasure. It’s possible that I would feel less guilty about Grace if I liked it less, since really liking this album seems too tied up with the infatuation with the now way overblown mythos of the tragic mysterious genius of Jeff Buckley. (I also distinctly recall hearing “Hallelujah” played twice over misty teenaged montage scenes on The O.C., and that probably doesn’t help either). But I do really like it, especially for the ways in which it is conflicted, earthy, and even cheesy. On Grace, Jeff Buckley always seemed to me to be just as much or more a lounge singer and barroom cover-band leader as he was an otherworldly angelic figure. The cover of “Hallelujah” is still the best track, and the one most nakedly yearning toward transcendence, but it also is all about very earthy desires. (I heard a critic on the radio last week claim the John Cale’s version of the song is better than Buckley’s. That’s some contrarian bullshit, for the record.) Grace also puts “Corpus Christi Carol” right next to the most standard rocker on the album, “Eternal Life.” The effect is jarring, but a perfect encapsulation of how I think of Grace. It’s an album by a standard rocker who was a good, but not great, songwriter, but also an album that ably moves way, way beyond that. More importantly, though, it shows how the truly transcendent highs are only real or meaningful when they begin, and ultimately stay, within the mundane and prosaic language of rock and roll. Now I haven’t studied theology for a few years, but the title of the album strikes me as especially apt, because isn’t grace only grace when it enters into the ordinary and fallen world? Pure transcendence in pop music is what, Enya? Case closed.

Station started to fade. We picked another one up the very next day.

#3 The Replacements, Tim (Sire, 1985)

I might have cheated to get this one in so high on my list. At the time when I had first received the email from Brandon to come up with a top 25, I hadn’t listened to Tim for nearly seven years, ever since I had this and over 100 other cds stolen. (By the way, if anyone out there ever finds a copy of Tim in a pawn shop in Christchurch with “SB” written on the disc, please report it as stolen. thx.) This album and band were my high-school favorites (I’m not that old, by the way – my introduction to the Replacements came through a cutout bin purchase of their final album All Shook Down shortly after they broke up). My comfortable, never-been-anywhere, never-drank-a-drop 16-year-old self obsessed over lonely desperate youth songs like “Here Comes a Regular” and “Bastards of Young” as if I had written them myself. I hadn’t replaced this record all those years because I had a copy of a Replacements greatest hits cd that had the better-known songs off Tim on it. But when I finally bought a copy last November, I realized/remembered how stunning the non-‘greatest hits’ tracks are. Yes, “Left of the Dial” = superclassic, but “Hold My Life”, “Swinging Party”, and holy shit, “Little Mascara” are also amazing songs. I never fully bought into the beery punk fuckup mythos of the Replacements (I’ll readily admit that “Lay it Down Clown” is a pretty average track). The Replacements/Paul Westerberg were always at their best in my mind when they balanced, as on this album, the disaffected proto-emo shtick with great pop songs. For that reason, despite Let It Be's reputation as the canonical Replacements record, I'll take Tim over it any day (OK, 6 days out of 7).

Windex tears flowed down the robot’s face; he never felt a mother’s embrace.

#4 The Silver Jews, American Water (Drag City, 1998)

Well, nearly six months after I wrote #5, and over two months since anyone’s posted at all, I’ve finally decided that I can’t let this project die. Maybe my top 4 will fall in the forest with no one around, but at least I’m not a quitter.

I was initially going to say that American Water is country music for an alternate universe. I think it’s more accurate, though, if only slightly less banal, to say that this album is country music for an alternate universe that we just happen to live in. It’s frequently and bizarrely hilarious (I listened to this record for all of about 10 seconds, just enough to hear David Berman sing “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection” on “Random Rules”, before I decided to buy it – see also the couplet from “Send in the Clouds” at the title of this post). Berman’s lyrics also reveal a darkly insightful edge to his (and our) comic world. This is best exemplified in “Smith and Jones Forever,” which I hear as the standout track. “Smith and Jones” draws a picture of the vast America that holds up and hides underneath our more comfortable world. Now, we’ve all seen things like the shirtless guy on Cops, so we can see our selves laugh at the obvious and pathetic humor in lines like “they sat there with their hooks in the water and their mustaches caked with airplane glue,” and “come let us adore them, California overboard, when the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold.” But while still witty, the next verse’s “the alleys are the footnotes of the avenues,” also contains a grimmer truth. The most moving part of the song for me, though, comes in the final verse, where, accompanied by a muted bass line and barely audible and chaotic guitar notes, Berman begins a story: “got two tickets for a midnight execution, we hitchhike our way from Odessa to Houston.” More voyeurism of the underclass spectacle – an occasion for gothic carnivalesque adventure (tickets and hitchhiking). The next line, though, repeats the phrase, “and when they turn on the chair, something’s added to the air” at which point the snare and guitar drop back in for the word: “…forever.” Something’s added to the air, forever. That final shock of a word shoots through the humor, not negating it, but yet reminding us how the things we want to laugh at and to repress never fully go away when we want them to.

All right. I meant to keep this short. I also want to observe that while it seems wrong to say so, this album is my favorite project that Stephen Malkmus has been involved in. On to #3…

Peter and his monkey laugh, and I laugh with them

#5 Modest Mouse, The Lonesome Crowded West (Up, 1997)

The author Flannery O’Connor famously described the South as a place that is “Christ-haunted." Having lived in the South for coming up on seven years now, I’m here to tell you that Flannery O’Connor is full of shit. Forgive me if I misunderstand the rules of the undead, but for Christ to be able to haunt anything, wouldn’t he have to die first (again, I guess)? Believe me, Christ is far from dead in these parts. Saying that the South is haunted, to my mind, is essentially a way to say, “hey, every other person here is a Baptist, but we’re still cool and mysterious and gothic.”

Now, the South certainly does have more than enough myth and mystery to go around (listen to any album by the excellent Drive-By Truckers, for example). As The Lonesome Crowded West suggests, however, it’s much more accurate to say that the region that Jesus haunts is the wide wide American West. Unlike in the South, from the first years that my people first defiled the Indians’ holy grounds, the West has never taken well to the pieties and religions of its parents. And while j.c. certainly makes his presence known out there, this album envisions a tired-out deity who, in his very otherworldliness and flamboyance, blends in with the rest of the kooks. In Modest Mouse’s vision, God is a slob like one of us, but here the ‘us’ is a motley collection of angry cowboys, pornographers, grinning salesmen, get-rich schemers, and drunkard good-for-nothings.

Much like with The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse creates on this record a coherent musical and thematic world, but what makes this record slightly better, in my opinion, is that this one is more comic. From the first track, “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” wherein we all share an Orange Julius in America’s future ghost towns, through the last song, “Styrofoam Boots/It’s All Nice,” where the Big Man saunters through St. Peter’s (and his monkey’s) playground, “lookin’ a bit like everyone I’ve ever seen/ he moves like crisco disco, breath 100% Listerine,” this record puts forth an insightfully silly (but not entirely unserious) view of this great country. And though it sounds like a Very Important and Thought-Provoking Idea to say that a place is “Christ-haunted,” if we have learned anything from Casper and Scooby Doo episodes, it’s that ghosts are funny. The West is ridiculous. Cowboy Dan and “Doin’ the Cockroach” are ridiculous. And in this landscape, our buddy the carpenter’s apprentice (who appears in “Jesus Christ Was an Only Child”) and his apostles (in the heart-rending “Bankrupt on Selling”) are no different.

It’s not all fun times and chuckles, of course. The flip side of the car-salesman deity is the absent deity. In “Styrofoam Boots” we also hear that “well I’ll be damned,/ you were right, no one’s running this whole thing,” and “God takes care of himself, and you of you.” When we have a God reduced to haunting these (literally?) godforsaken places, even drunken Cowboy Dan can take his potshots (“He fired his rifle in the sky/ said, ‘God if I have to die, you will have to die’”). This unlikeable cowboy is a perfect metaphor for the utopian individualism and staggering hubris of the myth of the West, in which each person writes their own history. Even more than Ms. O’Connor, Cowboy Dan and Modest Mouse too are full of shit. Unlike with the countless myths of the South, however, at least this one doesn’t take itself all that seriously.

As the girls with pigtails were running from little boys wearing bowties their parents bought them

#6 Death Cab for Cutie, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes (Barsuk, 2000)

Believe me, Julia and I viewed the scene in 2005 when we saw this band play Cameron Indoor Stadium (yes, really). We saw the braces and pimples. We saw the rapt crowd loft their open cell phones in the air and sing along to “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” So I am fully aware that the teenagers love their new pop heroes, Death Cab for Cutie. And that makes it odd, though no less true, to say that when We Have The Facts came out, it sounded improbably avant-garde to me. The reasonably opaque lyrics and inscrutable song titles that never actually appeared in the lyrics, the saturation of reverb, and the (what seemed to me to be) the glacial pace of half of the songs on the record – all of these things can probably be attributed to my musical naiveté, but I don’t think I was completely off-base. This album, I think above all their others, is the one that best stakes out a sound unique to this band. And it is the album that has, more than any other one in my top 25, created a fanboy. Before the Cameron show, I think I saw them play 5 or 6 times (R.I.P. Go! Studios in Carrboro, NC). Also, I will always hold a special place in my heart for the band that wrote the only song I know of that's (maybe) about being/loving a science grad student (“Scientist Studies”).

I can’t begrudge them their success at all – I think it’s well earned, and my opinion is that if teenagers are going to listen to something, let it be DCFC rather than something much worse. There is something sad, though, about seeing times change. I wore my DCFC t-shirt today as a sort of act of reclamation, but I have to admit I felt a little sheepish doing so. This isn’t meant to be an elegy – all of DCFC’s albums (and especially We Have the Facts) are in my more-or-less regular rotation, and upon re-evaluation, Plans, while still their weakest album, is much better than I gave it credit at first.

Finally, because there’s always time for a nutty idea, here’s my theory about DCFC’s career trajectory: On their next record, The Photo Album, Ben Gibbard sings this line, “and now we all know that the words were true in the sappiest songs.” This line, in 2001, was a brilliant insight.* It was a manifesto for trading in tired out 90s slacker irony for sincerity, and DCFC went about trying to enact this idea. But, when the results came out (a.k.a. Plans), old fans like me realized that maybe we kinda liked the irony more than we thought. On Plans, the songs are sincere, straightforward, heartfelt, and, well, a little too boring and sappy (or perhaps not the right kind of sappy – songs about summer flings and affected adolescent suicide pacts probably require some distance, but the best song on Plans “What Sarah Said” is effective because it is a sincere, blunt song about death, with a coda that repeats the line “So who’s gonna watch you die?” I think one must have a mind of winter not to think of misery while listening to this song).

*As the year 2001 suggests, I think there is also a political undertone here. Desire for the end of irony and for sincerity and trust was all well and good before our nation had lived through six years where we have been repeatedly told that 2+2=5 (or maybe better 2+2=tens of thousands of dead). A lot of things could be said here, but on a music blog let me keep it to: F*ck B*sh for taking away sincerity and for taking away my Death Cab.

Another version of this miniature Rome to set fire to

#7 Destroyer, Destroyer’s Rubies (Merge, 2006)

So an upstart 2006 release elbows its way into my top 10. Hey, 2006 was a good year for music, and the fevered, obsessive listening that this record caused made me feel like a headphoned teenager in my parents' basement. The presence of Destroyer's Rubies, in my top 10 is justified by its quality, but it also stands in for optimism about excitement over music in the future. Having just turned 30, I am in desperate fear of waking up one day to find out that I only listen to music I discovered between the ages of 18-28. Destroyer’s Rubies, in other words, gives me hope that I will continue to be thrilled by music, both by new releases and by yet-undiscovered back catalog records.

Let me explain myself in typically long-winded fashion. One of the most distinctive aspects of this album is its wordiness. Dan Bejar has a skipping, dollar-word filled cadence that, though it certainly does not neglect meter, rushes through these songs as if to attempt to say everything at once. His lyrics seem to be designed for the ultra-in group – multiple references to his own songs, to obscure parts of his hometown of Vancouver, to the rock canon (Floyd, Zep, the Beatles, “Losing My Religion”). Yet, the (almost)-to-the-point-of-parody hipster intellectual rambling also shows a real awareness of the limits of words’ signifying power. (And I suspect that many, if not most, of the obscure lyrics are not meant to be deciphered). Note, on the one hand, the countless references to the visual arts – just to share the song titles, there’s “European Oils,” “Painter In Your Pocket,” and “Watercolors Into the Ocean.” In fact, you might even say that Rubies is about art and painting, making it almost literally an exercise in ‘dancing about architecture.’ And then, on the other hand, the most distinctive vocal/lyrical link among the songs is the ‘la da da da das’ that feature prominently in six of Rubies’ ten songs. These nonsense syllables, if you want to get all pseudo-academic about it (and you probably don’t) seem to highlight the ultimate failure of “high-art/poetic lyrics’” rock music (which is of course a self-criticism as well as a criticism of the Bob Dylan-esque “authentic American bohemian intellectual” idea of rock music) because they expose the idea that the only things that really authentically signify in rock are barroom sing-alongs.

And the barroom la-da-das, if you skipped the end of that last paragraph, are incredibly fun and catchy. Another secret about this album is that, far from being an impossibly esoteric art project, it is actually a straight-up classic rock record. Bejar tries to hide it (or makes the listener work for it) by kicking off the album with “Rubies,” a 9-minute song that doesn’t really have a chorus. (I love that song now, but I’ll admit I foolishly skipped it 8 out of the first 10 times I listened to Rubies). On the face of it, this is a ‘difficult’ artsy record, but as the shuffly countrified strum of the second song “Your Blood,” indicates to all who are brave enough to soldier on past “Rubies,” we are in familiar waters here. Unlike some other Destroyer records (the Air Supply-meets-Nintendo Your Blues comes to mind), this one is, sonically at least, very accessible. I think it is definitely an advance on the classic rock idiom – Bejar is a highly inventive songwriter and by no means a slavish copier – but it’s not musically revolutionary (my mom heard this in the background one time this summer and asked me, “Is this David Bowie?” The clever and correct answer to this question would have been “Essentially”). As Bejar sings in “Looters Follies,” “A life in art, and a life in mimicry … it’s the same thing!”

In fact, its fundamentally traditional, even out of step, feel might ultimately be what already makes it one of my all-time favorites (and perhaps what, despite glowing initial reviews, made it absent from many critics’ year-end lists. Prof. Cougar didn’t even put it in his top 30 of the year – an omission that actually had me second-guessing my ranking.) In a time when individual song downloads and ringtones rule, Rubies presents a compelling argument for the viability and relevance for the supposedly lifeless form of the album. When classic rock has either been ossified into 50-song radio playlists or bastardized as turgid (or is that turd-gid?) acts like Audioslave, Nickelback, and Daughtry, Rubies shows that this tradition still has much to offer. Can the dead classics live on into the 21st century to be aped and bastardized and otherwise destroyed by new generations of artists? If so, it might be because of this record.

Oh, that we could always see such spirit through the year

#8 Vince Guaraldi Trio, A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1965)

Plan A had me writing this one a month and a half ago. But perhaps that’s for the best. I assembled my top 25 just before the onslaught of 40-year retrospectives on this album, and when Christmas rolled around, I felt much less clever than before. I feared that I was getting caught up in the seasonal hype, or even worse, getting caught up in a tacky nostalgic Zeitgeist moment. One thing about Christmas records, though, is that they disappear from our stereos, if not our consciousnesses, come Jan 1. Now that I no longer worry about getting sick of hearing of this record (and in fact am now saddened to think that T-giving is 10 months away), I stand by my decision to rate it so high.

Plan A also had me writing this blurb with the record playing in the background. Since the holidays are over, I can’t be listening to Christmas music. So I’ll have to do this one by memory, even though – and here’s where I might surprise you – I don’t have this record etched into my soul. Like everyone else, I watched the TV special almost every year, but I didn’t own a copy of the soundtrack until 2002. In other words, this record still holds surprises for me. I think that’s what makes A Charlie Brown Christmas not just a great Christmas album but a great album, full stop. Everybody knows how warm and cuddly and eggnog-and-fireplaces it is (and surely, “Linus and Lucy” is a heavyweight in the ‘most joyful song ever’ competition). But it can be easy to gloss over its appropriately icy Christmas edge, to gloss over Guaraldi’s amazing patience and use of silence and space. There’s more than a twinge of holiday loneliness here. Just compare it with contemporary popular Christmas music. Contemporary music is popstars and Mannheim Steamroller, with sounds and effects crammed together and piled on top of one another, downright enforcing holiday cheer. Saying, YOU WILL BE MERRY, OR ELSE. Much like the TV program, (which, if you haven't seen it recently, is so different from current TV pacing and narrating style that it may as well have been made in Eastern Europe), the music on this soundtrack takes its time, explores neglected corners, meditates on the holiday, and isn’t afraid to let children express the emotions and thoughts that we don’t even let adults express anymore.

Plan A, finally, had me not getting sonned by Papa S. I remember having a conversation with him a couple of months back where we revealed to one another our plans to include Vince in our top 25s. I was sure that if he hadn’t revealed A Charlie Brown Christmas by #5, he wouldn’t do it at all. I was ready to call him out. But pride goeth, etc.

Hmm … right. I practice many styles.

#9 Wyclef Jean, The Carnival (Columbia, 1997)

What’s worse, a top 25 devoid of hip-hop, or one with a single token album? Nowadays, it seems that an unfamiliarity with hip-hop is tantamount to massive unhipness, if not covert racism (well, at least this album appears higher than the album by Stephen Merritt, that unredeemable cracker). Well, my list is what it is, and The Carnival is what it is, too. Wyclef Jean and his self-proclaimed eclectic genius might now be a symbol of overreaching, but that shouldn’t diminish just how the captivating this album is. In a world of overly frenetic and über-masculine hip-hop, the Carnival sounds loose, laid back, and even charmingly pastoral, even when talking about catching bullets in one’s goose.

And then there is the nostalgia factor: I don’t know if I went to one party from 97-99 where I didn’t hear at least one (and usually multiple) tracks from this record. In fact, all the memories of social time spent with this in the background made it impossible for me to listen to The Carnival in the intervening years. Only when B.C. sent out the call to compile a top 25 this past year did I dig this one back up and realize that I still love this record. It still makes me overly nostalgic, but putting it on the stereo with the fam and seeing an eighteen-month old dance to it certainly eases the pain.

So many good moments here: the crooning sample that intros “To All the Girls”; that sweeping string line in “Gone Til November”; …we are not stopping for no red lights tonight!...; the entrancing French rap + Lauryn Hill’s belting chorus of “Sang Fezi”; …even in New Haven, gunpowder…; the loving and deserved homage to the Bee Gees; F-R-E-S-H.

Finally, as the ultimate evidence for my love for this album: I even like the skits. Down Lo Ho? Bishop? Classic.

P.S. Oh God I almost forgot "Mona Lisa," aka the song that did the impossible: make me like The Neville Brothers. Take a moment to comphrend the magnitude of this.

Yes yes yes it was profoundly meaningless

#10 The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs (Merge, 1999)

In the early days of this millennium you may have caught me calling this album/set a work of genius. Three years ago, it would have been in my top 3. It obviously no longer is, and this is why: about the time that the follow up to 69 Love Songs, i, came out, I read an interview with Stephen Merritt (the songwriter on display here) in which he laughed off the notion that his songs had any real element of sincerity to them. Now, such a statement is, on the face of it, spot on, as Merritt’s songs are populated by the most ridiculous collection of misfits, maudlin self-pitiers, and delusional obsessives. And I mean that it the most complimentary way – Merritt is, hands down, the most clever and witty lyricist active today. These songs are funny. But as good as a comedy record can be, comedy records never hold up beyond a handful of listens. Sure, these songs are funny – but in my mind, many of them are also incredibly moving (listen to “I Don’t Believe in the Sun” and tell me otherwise). So, upon reading Merritt’s interpretation of his own songs, I decided, hey, I’m not going to let him decide how I listen to this album. Death of the Author and the rest. Thus says Sean: 69 Love Songs is not a comedy record. However, I couldn’t get the nagging idea that these songs are indeed fundamentally ridiculous out of my head, and it has affected my opinion of 69 Love Songs. The way I see it, if these songs aren’t actual love songs, or if there isn’t at least a core of real emotion to be found somewhere in this collection, I don’t want to listen to it any more.

In case you were wondering, I still listen to it.

Now that I’ve gotten the negatives out of the way, it is now time to rave. Julia and I encountered this album when we lived in near penury in New Zealand (I’ve been required to tell you that Julia liked The Magnetic Fields first, and I, in fact foolishly mocked them before I became educated), and we had a very small record collection. In fact, an artificially reduced record collection – we got this right at the time when I had my entire record collection stolen from our house (while we were in the house, too!). So, we essentially lived and breathed Magnetic Fields for months, and we would trade observations about which song this week was the greatest pop song ever written. I remember poring over this album in exegetical detail, reading the companion booklet in real time with the recordings maybe a half-dozen times. (Do I need to mention that I was unemployed at the time, which -I guess- may have contributed to the above-mentioned poverty?) So, 69 Love Songs may be smirky and (please god no) ironic, but despite itself, I would probably still say that 69 Love Songs is the best and most important work of pop music in the past 20 years. (And as a totally nerdy aside, I wonder – and would like to pose this question to others here – if this album has directly contributed if not created the extremely pop-friendly climate in professional rock criticism. I realize that it might just as equally be a gimmicky footnote in pop history, even if I feel otherwise).

Interlude, pt. 1: Best non-2006 albums first heard in 2006

The cusp of my top 10 seems like a good place to step back and do a year-end review. But rather than talk about 2006 releases, which Mr. Cougar has quite capably done (even if there was by my account a glaring omission in his top 30). Rather, I think it is just as fun to unearth lost (to me) treasures, and ever since I became a parent (read: shut-in) I’ve had more time to devote to rock archaeology. Though I have been dabbling more and more into Papa Shoegaze territory, these picks all belong to the classic rock tradition, though classic rock broadly construed.

So, my top 8 non-2006 records of 2006 are:

8. Kate Bush Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985)

Three strikes against this one: 1) The spouse hates this – “too Celtic,” says she, which is a more than valid criticism in my book. 2) There is a near unlistenable artsy number here featuring a cd-skipping sound and evidently Satan at his most grumbly as a guest vocalist. 3) The album cover is bizarre, all weimereiners and Alberto VO5 – wait, I think I actually like it. Let me try #3 again. 3) The fact that I like this record is final verification that I am indeed over 30. Regardless, the songcraft is absolutely undeniable here, and if you can be OK with pop music made for full-blown adults, I guarantee you will like this.

7. Glenn Branca The Ascension (99, 1981)

Heavily textured instrumental electric guitar with a rhythm section. Drone that rocks and that makes a chord change sound like a revelation. Is it rock or avant-garde classical? I don’t know, but I know what I like.

6. Prince, Purple Rain (Warner Bros., 1984)

It’s not like I hadn’t heard any of this before, but it now makes sense. Remember when pop idols were geniuses? Re-check out the title track, which is an epic (8 min!) life-altering guitar slow jam easily mistaken (by me, at least) for a John Hughes prom scene cheesefest. When that falsetto drops in at around the 5:15 minute mark, get out your kleenexes.

5. Faith No More, Angel Dust (Slash, 1992)

Surprisingly awesome. No joke! We can’t blame Faith No More for the atrocious mook rock that came after it – well, yes, we can, but that only reduces this album from an A to an A-. Also, take note that “Crack Hitler” is only the second most uncomfortable-to-type song title on the record.

4. Afghan Whigs Gentlemen (Elektra, 1993)

Again, I knew some of this from back in the 120 Minutes days, but I only fully became aware of its majesty this year. Among the 90s alternarock classics, only Siamese Dream is better.

3. Otis Redding Good to Me: Recorded Live at the Whisky A Go Go 1966 (Stax, 1993)
Otis Redding is who we thought he was.

2. Thin Lizzy Jailbreak (Mercury, 1976)

So I should begin by noting that before acquiring this album I had only heard “The Boys are Back in Town” (which I love – even the thought of that double guitar solo gives me that gym-class-rope feeling). The rest of the album is more than up to the standard of that song, though. The lyrics are, well, not good, but this album completely epitomizes and kills its genre, so much so that I wonder why anyone listens to any classic rock other than this. In fact, I feel cheated by the whole Classic Rock Industrial Complex; why are there at least five Bob Seger songs in the American collective consciousness, compared to only one by these guys?

1. The Exploding Hearts Guitar Romantic (Dirtnap, 2003)

KLASSIK!! The Clash + The Replacements = pop punk awesome = buy now! Raw, funny, moving, super catchy. I picked this up in late Nov. Next time around, I predict it will be in my top 25.

Could we please be objective?

#11 Belle & Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister (Matador, 1996)

The scrooges among us might feel that I am supposed to be ashamed of this pick somehow. And maybe – maybe – it’s a bad thing that this is the pinnacle of millennial college boy wussrock, but let us not ignore that If You’re Feeling Sinister contains at least 9 mixtape-worthy, fanfuckingtastic songs (the remainder, “The Boy Done Wrong Again,” is merely mortal but still decent). This album is more top-to-bottom consistent than just about every other album on my top 25 (and, I would wager, than many of yours, too).

When you feel the darkness shining through, what are you gonna do?

#12 Built to Spill, Perfect From Now On (Warner Bros., 1997)

As I crawl begrudgingly back into the UH T-25 sweatshop to bang out still 12 more mini-treatises (treatisettes?) I don’t feel quite as ashamed as I might be, seeing as the factory floor is still mostly empty, save for a dusty U2 classic in the corner and some unspeakable spill that must have come from D.L. Roth. Nonetheless, I still feel compelled to offer an excuse. The holidays came and went, but it’s not like I spent all that time toasting chestnuts and stringing popcorn back at Sean B HQ (though know this: we were festive, my friends). I had more than enough free time to climb into the upper reaches of my countdown, but with this next one I could think neither of some clever, yet crystallizingly insightful metaphor, nor of a poignant coming of age reminiscence to propel me to the keyboard. So that’s my excuse. That, and my in-laws live in south Louisiana and know how to keep their cabinets and fridges stocked with the good stuff, if my drift is being caught.

So I hope it’s enough to say that Perfect From Now On is a darn good record. Built to Spill is good times all around (and if I could import a tune or two from Keep It Like a Secret here, that might make for a top 3 album), but this one is the most album-y, and the one I never skip tracks on. Probably the most expansive BtS album, and of its 8 tracks, only one is less than five minutes long. I want to call it meandering, but it’s not jam band-esque noodling. The songwriter and bonafide guitar hero (the only such animal in indie rock? other suggestions solicited in the comments…) who runs this show, Doug Martsch, displays an amazing skill for creating a sound that is simultaneously improvisational and purposeful. That might sound not quite possible, so let me try a simile: the songs here are like a lazy, daydreaming afternoon walk on the beach, one with sharp and almost random turns, with highs and lows, but one where you look back at the end and realize that where there used to be two sets of footprints in the sand, there is now an awesome guitar riff.

If you can forgive the barely tolerable album cover (I almost can’t), this one is well worth devoting some of your time to. It starts off a little slow – or, rather, the first ten minutes are good but not mind blowing – but Perfect From Now On gets better with each song, culminating with the best song here, “Untrustable.” In this almost 9-min epic, Mr. Martsch packs into one track a lesser mortal’s whole album worth of ideas. Martsch, a decent lyricist who shows flashes of aphoristic brilliance, asks an important question (which I’ve quoted in the title of this post), to which he seems to answer: drop some huge guitar rock in a coda, then mellow out a little, and finally finish with another, louder coda. To which I reply: more, please.

First gear, it's all right

#13 Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (Matador, 1996)

I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One may be the best mixtape ever made. Yo La Tengo cover vast swaths of musical territory here: from droney beats to fuzzed out noise rock, strummy folk pop, ultrasensitive organ balladry, bassanova, and places elsewhere. They just happened to have written almost all of the songs here (excepting a simultaneously amped up and impassive cover of “Little Honda,” as well as the closer “My Little Corner of the World”).

It’s so easy to take YLT for granted. Witness the recent reception of their 2006 album I Will Beat Your Ass Convincingly and Then Write a Long Album Title About It (not real title). The new record is yet another gem filled with genre-crossing music, but the collective response seems to have been, “meh, well, it’s another YLT album.” We’ve been spoiled by their sheer competency. Their desire to become America’s Greatest Cover Band, to become the Harry Smiths of the late 20th – early 21st century may have made them out to appear as archivists more than artists. But I don’t want to neglect how stunning I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One is. Far from being a mealy-mouthed collection of songs that can’t find its own voice, the album really creates its own space.

And time. It clocks in at somewhere around 75 minutes, and I always think of it as a metaphor for a whole day – a weekend night and the next day, to be precise. OK, so it doesn’t match perfectly, but bear with me (if there are any of you who still read my gasbag posts. SF59 suxx – just kidding! Sorry! I was only testing). The opener, “Return to Hot Chicken” (Ugh – YLT’s titles…) is a brief, quiet guitar tune that exudes the anticipation of the night to come, putting on that one set of cool clothes, changing them, coyly eyeing the mirror, changing again. “Moby Octopad” and “Sugarcube” are the party – getting the swerve on, a little dancing, rocking with the mates at the jukebox, etc. A couple of tracks later, we get the late-night eye-making with that cute maybe-more-than-friend at the party. This is “Shadows,” “Stockholm Syndrome,” and, of course, as the clincher, “Autumn Sweater.” With a song so emotastic as “Autumn Sweater,” the sensitive hero is bound to succeed, and “Little Honda” represents ... well, this song seems to be turned up kinda loud, maybe we can give them their privacy. “Green Arrow” is literally the sleepy instrumental for the last few moments of night, and we know that bedtime was very late, because the next song is a peppy, but not hangover-harshing, morning track called, “One PM Again.” “The Lie and How We Told It,” and “Center of Gravity” continue that Sunday afternoon vibe, though the latter begins to pep it up a bit (this is the little bassanova-y number). And maybe now friends are popping over with burgers for the grill and a frisbee. And maybe even a half-rack or two of a nice unassuming macrobrew, because it’s only about now that protagonist finally comes to terms with the idea of having a drink again. The music gets louder again, and “Spec Bebop” is another long groovy head-bobbing drone. A few more bottles empty and “We’re An American Band” comes on. It’s not that Grand Funk atrocity, but the title is evocative of the laid back classic rock good time (this song might be my favorite one on the album because it introduced me to the previously inconceivable idea that feedback could be gorgeous). This song puts us right in the middle of the party again, but y’know, work does start again tomorrow morning, and perhaps it would be better to break things up and put a cap on a well-lived weekend with a mellow but jaunty song, the slightly-countrified jam of “My Little Corner of the World.” A full 24 hours, but all good times must come to an end, and it’s only a little while before we can start things up again.

An interstellar burst

#14 Radiohead, OK Computer (Capitol, 1997)


Sometimes the canon makers are right.

Here for now, transient tomorrow

#15 Son Volt, Trace (Warner Bros., 1995)

Trust me, I know that of Uncle Tupelo’s two children (nephews?), Wilco is the more accomplished one. And yes, Wilco’s music has been more interesting, more of a cultural achievement. Son Volt jumped out to a more auspicious beginning, with Trace coming out the same time as the lukewarm A.M. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, though, caught up to and jumped ahead Son Volt’s Jay Farrar, and has become the boy who has moved from the rural lands of alt-country to the avant-garde city (the cover photo of YHF is not insignificant in this respect) to become a quiet man, living in tents. Farrar remains the more gauche man of the field, the (to spell it out) Esau to Tweedy’s Jacob. And we all know who ended up having a nation named after him.

I surely can’t be the only one out there who has sympathy for the earthier and less crafty older brother. I know that there is probably few genres more passé at this moment than No Depression roots rock, and Wilco’s experiments in moving beyond that form have been wildly successful, but it really a crime to refrain from innovation with genre, especially when you absolutely nail it? And Trace may a genre record, but there aren’t many better, in my opinion. Wilco may have my head, but Son Volt has my heart, or better, my gut – so, can you guess which one of the two appears on my top 25?

Even though Son Volt’s entire output is underrated (and thinking about this list finally drove me to pay attention to Okemah and the Melody of Riot, which I bought last year and listened to once, and it’s pretty solid, too), they set themselves up for failure by making the best song of their entire catalog the first track of their first album. “Windfall,” with its simple and effective chorus, “may the wind take your troubles away,” is an ideal evocation of the American myth of the open road. For me, Trace is one of the few good memories of a summer job in 1995 which required me to drive 500 miles a week and stay in cheap hotels from Sunday to Thursday (long story … no, short story, but boring). I spent many many hours on empty Montana two-lanes hoping for my troubles to be taken away. The wind never did that, of course, but the song and this album helped.

Good-bye small hands, good-bye small heart

#16 Sleater-Kinney, The Hot Rock (Kill Rock Stars, 1999)

If we are now supposed to speak about the late Sleater-Kinney in the hushed, reverent tones reserved for ‘classic’ bands, The Hot Rock might not be the best album to bring into the conversation. It doesn’t have the Rock And/Or Roll Hall Of Fame vibe to it – it is not characterized the brassy, catchy punk of the earlier records, nor the arena-filling classic rock vibe of their last two. Even more, unlike other of their albums, the Hot Rock does not take on wide-reaching social statements such as GWB and war or fake feminists or consumerism. Rather, the dramas here are more personal, and every bit (and more) intense. Don’t get me wrong, everything S-K has put out has been excellent, but the Hot Rock is the album of theirs that best creates its own world. The songs are intimate, introspective, and unpredictable and best played on headphones late at night. It’s definitely not a laid-back folky strummer – they bring the loud, too, though the melodic anthemic bits (and there are several) appear at not always obvious junctures. This is not really a singles-type record, but standouts include the always cathartic, “Memorize Your Lines,” and possibly my favorite (if one of their least characteristic) S-K track, “Get Up.”

I’ll keep this one short in order to avoid falling behind with the countdown, but as a passing note, I want to note that the Hot Rock has the best album cover in my top 25. It’s a simple candid shot, but I feel like it perfectly captures my image of the band – effortlessly cool, purposeful, even aloof. Makes me want to live in Portland.

p.s. this is the second selection in my top 25 that includes a song about divine numerology (here, “God is a Number”). A third one might mean something.

Let's not get metaphysical

#17 The Lucksmiths, Why That Doesn’t Surprise Me (Candle / Drive-In, 2001)

This one makes me nervous. A good kind of nervous, but nonetheless. I want to be downright evangelistic with the Lucksmiths, a 3-piece pop band from Australia. Their output, up to eight full-lengths since 1993, contains a string of consistently remarkable, well-crafted pop music. Their songs are catchy, moving, beautiful, and at times giddy (and at other times all those at once). I appreciate the music of outfits like Belle and Sebastian and Magnetic Fields (both of whom just might appear before too long on my countdown – don’t hate me because I’m sensitive), but in my opinion, the Lucksmiths outshine the rest of the indie-pop universe. OK, to orient ourselves, let’s go to Belle and Sebastian for comparison. The Lucksmiths radiate an accepting, yet optimistic world-weariness and a buoyant joy not quite present in B&S’s winking, cynical knowingness. Also, our heroes show a literate and understated sense of humor and whimsy that is most always less studied and more likeable. Man, go listen to some Lucksmiths.

But since we are ranking our top 25 albums, not our top 25 bands, it might be worth asking why the Lucksmiths are so relatively low on my list. True, this entry might be more for the Lucksmiths’ gesammelte Werke than for this particular record (Naturaliste and The Green Bicycle Case are just about as good). I love this album, even if it’s less an album for a generation than an album for an afternoon, and Why That Doesn’t Surprise Me has a humble feel to it that somehow doesn’t seem appropriate for a “TOP 25 OF ALL TIME” list. In other words, it’s ephemeral and wears that on its sleeve: the first track, for example, announces, “I could never understand you/ hating music to hold hands to/ sometime something you can dance to/ is the last thing that you need.” While most of rock and roll music seems to have been all about the impossible search for the intense experience, the elusive and always-postponed Satisfaction, The Lucksmiths content themselves with the very real, very attainable pleasure of holding hands.

So saying that this record is ephemeral is not an insult – so is the best of pop music! And so is a sunbeam, and a good Lucksmiths song can be as joyful as a blast of warmth on an early spring day or as fleetingly profound as a long shadow cast across a room in autumn. This is not Sad Bastard music; yes, several songs have and air of (sometimes deep) melancholy (“Broken Bones,” “First Cousin,” “All the Recipes I’ve Ever Ruined”), but the tone is never set to “junior-high journal self-pity.” In that sense, The Lucksmiths represent a more mature kind of pop. Instead of fixating on the sad loner stuck in his room with his Morrissey posters (though how much admittedly excellent pop music comes from that banal and pathetic point of view?), The Lucksmiths’ music always deals with the grown-up (or striving toward grown-up) life of love, relationships, and friendships. Accordingly the sense of humor is kind of dad-like. These songs are peppered with puns and wordplay (so all you sourpuss pun haters out there beware!). I’ll spare you a whole list, but a particularly good one comes in “Synchronized Sinking,” the most ebullient and catchy number on the record: “come on – please get it off your chest / it’s a commonplace but I’d suggest…” Also, the title of this post comes from my favorite one, a lesson in life and love by way of Olivia Newton-John: “I find it strange/ that these mountains make me miserable/ when the Great Dividing Range/ merely proves we’re indivisible/ Let’s not get metaphysical.”

Now to why I am nervous about this whole thing. I have to admit that every single time I’ve picked up a new Lucksmiths album (including this one), I have been slightly disappointed at first. This doesn’t mean that their career has regressed from their early works – far from it – but with each new album, I unconsciously expect a blast of pop awesomeness. And, except for a few songs (here, “Synchronized Sinking,” “Don’t Bring Your Work to Bed,” and a couple others), it doesn’t come. Rather, each new album’s pleasures are to be found in the discovery of repeated listens. I realize that I am offering a contradiction here – ephemeral pop that takes several listens to realize itself – but I also think that I am just trying to hedge my bets. Having told everyone out there about the Best Pop Band, I’m afraid people won’t like it. Well, if you like it, good times, and if you don’t that can be OK too. I said at the top that I want to evangelize about The Lucksmiths, and I do. Being an Episcopalian, however, by nature I can’t really be that evangelistic.

It’s not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder

#18 Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti, 2006)

Up until this album, I’ve felt that Neko Case’s material has been (sometimes very) good, but not great, held up in large degree by personality and that astonishing, booming voice. Some of her earlier songs, like “I Wish I Was the Moon,” and “Deep Red Bells,” gave glimpses, but only glimpses, of the mystery I’ve been looking for behind the countrified swagger. But on “Fox Confessor,” Case has created an album that finally fulfills the promise of what a Neko Case record could be. She’s done so, paradoxically, by putting together a group of songs that are strong precisely because they gesture toward something they never quite reach. Fox Confessor wells up with a mix of ache, longing, and ambiguity that have repeatedly echoed in my brain (and car and apt. and ipod). The sound of this album is so memorable and catchy that it wasn’t until after half a dozen listens that I realized that many of the songs are not structured around the traditional verse-chorus-repeat pop song format. I suppose that one could conceive of it as a criticism to say that some of the songs sound more like sketches than full songs, but even those that feel like half-songs (“A Widow’s Toast,” the chilling “At Last”) are more addictively evocative than frustratingly incomplete.

This is a record permeated with madness and mysticism. “Hold On, Hold On,” imagines a narrator who cannot maintain control over her impulses and desires, and dwells on the consequences of that might mean: “It’s the devil I love / and it’s funny, it’s real love/ and it’s real as true love.” Track eight, “Dirty Knife,” tells a tale of a family’s cabin-fevered path to insanity, which culminates with a ghostly and otherworldly (well, otherworldly if you don’t speak Ukrainian) verse sung in Ukrainian accompanied by stabbing cello punctuations. Similarly, the title track stakes out a descent into a dark-night-of-the-soul encounter with the Fox Confessor (an apparent reference to trickster mythology), and features, at the central thematic point of disorientation, a brief bloom of musical dissonance. The last line of the song, “will I ever see you again?/ Will there be no one above me to put my faith in? / I flooded my sleeves as I drove home again” suggests that the return from the encounter cannot be complete, and that the very moment of closeness with the divine is the moment of emptiness and nothingness, the moment of no turning back. The next song, then, a reworking of a traditional gospel tune, “John Saw That Number,” would seem misplaced, or perhaps a counter to the disorientation of the other songs. However, the John the Baptist we see here shows himself to be a crazy magician, an illiterate esoteric numerologist and astrologist, and this song seems to remind us that even the normal religion and experience we are comfortable with (no pagan animal gods, no mad Ukrainians) rests on a foundation just as mysterious and empty and nonsensical.

I shouldn’t get too high and mighty, though – some of the tracks here are full-on pop singalongs. The most immediately catchy is “Star Witness,” but my favorite one on the whole record might be the closer, “The Needle Has Landed.” Perhaps part of why Fox Confessor is so successful owes to the development in genre. Country, the primary format of Case’s earlier recordings, doesn’t seem to be equipped to handle this album’s themes and moods on its own, but with the addition of reverbed Twin-Peaks-style 50s pop, well, that’s a different story. It also doesn’t hurt that Case puts to outstanding use her well-known voice, which has always been able to be both bold and subtle (when I saw her live in support of Fox Confessor, she had Kelly Hogan’s excellent backup vocals turned up to a level almost equal to Case’s, and the effect was amazing: powerful and huge, but never over the top).

Let me pour you a little more Beaujolais while I tell you what I heard about on NPR the other day…

#19 Four Tet, Rounds (Domino, 2003)

According to my all-knowing itunes program, Four Tet qualifies as “electronica/dance.” Dance is certainly a stretch (though not as much as calling Ethiopiques “Reggae” – oh, itunes, I kid because I love), but I’m not even sure if I should call it electronica either. Though I’ve finally gotten over my irrational fear of electronic music, Four Tet’s music sounds very little like what any novice like me would think of as electronic. Everything sounds so human and so warm, even when, like with many of Four Tet’s work, the songs are reflective and wistful. Of course, the music is manipulated all over the place – to excellent effect – but you can imagine real musicians producing this. (Hmm … authenticity produced by artifice. Brandon, you can have at that.)

I first picked up Four Tet’s 2001 album “Pause” back in the Radio Free Records days, on the owner Ethan’s recommendation, and had it on the discman all the time (pre-ipod days! I also churned my own butter back then too, btw.). Everything I wrote above describes “Pause” as well, but “Rounds” is even better. Maybe what sets it apart is that it has so many memorable melodies. The nine-minute, “Unspoken” is a quiet number based on a short piano line, but it never ever gets boring. The last track, “Slow Jam” is probably the best one on here – another understated and peaceful track – but it is simply as catchy as the most explosive summertime pop single. “Rounds” is not, of course, a pop album; some of the songs are more exploratory, though even those have a tendency to resolve almost unnoticeably into melodic experiments (for example “And They Look Broken Hearted” and the stunning opening track, “Hands”).

Perhaps the only knock I can come up with on this gem is that, while it does show depth and rewards repeated listens, its surface is shiny, pleasant, and well, relaxing. Electronic music for the non-fans and casual listeners, I suppose. There’s probably absolutely nothing wrong with that, but “Rounds” is, of course, dinner party music, and I do wonder if indie-electronica of this stripe will become the Yacht Rock of the 21st century. The only thing that would bother me about that idea is that I think if I am going to go all bourgeois, I might as well do so while owning an awesome yacht.