Albums of 2008

Now is the time when I usually realize a new year has started, and it's time to pay attention to what music is going to be coming out. It's also the time I assemble my halfassed list of albums that stuck with me over the past year. Not a bad year for music, really. I don't know how many of these I'll be listening to in a decade, but there's probably one or two in here.

The theme, if there is one, is decidedly retro. I suspect I'm getting old...

What normally prompts this post? Realizing that my friend Dan over in Shanghai has his list up already. A comparison of finds is in order, as always.

These, however, are in no particular order. I have decided that ranking art is fascist.

Raphael Saadiq: The Way I See It
This album sounds like 1963, then 1968, then 75. You get the idea. The former lead for Tony! Toni! Toné! manages to point out the cracks and crevices Soul and R&B left behind a few decades back. The result is an album of music that sounds like an old favorite you had forgotten you were missing. There's a remarkable collaboration with Stevie Wonder, and the collaboration with Rebirth and the Infamous Young Spodie on the Katrina meditation "Big Easy" is not to be missed. Utterly retro and utterly, urgently, contemporary. This album will stay on heavy rotation for a while.


Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Dig, Lazarus, Dig!
This album, on the other hand, is timeless in the same way that all of Nick Cave's albums are timeless. There's no bowing to convention, to fad or fashion. There's just Cave's poetic turn of phrase, idiosyncratic phrasing, and hypnotic melodies and rhythms. The themes (as always) are dark, the lyrics wry and smirking. ("He never asked to be raised up from the tomb / No one ever actually asked him to forsake his dreams...") I'm a sucker for just about everything Cave does, I admit.



Grouper: Dragging a Dead Deer Up A Hill
My brother recommended this one to me, and he was, as he often is, right. This albums melodic lines rise from the subconscious awake, asleep, and in the sunless light times in between. "Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping" is the kind of song that works with the electronic production at which Grouper excels, but it would be just as powerful sung by a single voice. It's the heartbreaking music you hear just before you wake up, and can never quite recall afterward.



Beck: Modern Guilt
Like you're driving at night somewhere between mountains and desert and you've stumbled on the best AM radio station ever, but the transmission's so garbled you never really hear the name of the songs or the singers properly.





Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson: Two Men With the Blues
The entire notion of this album is preposterous. Willie Nelson? The ancient country songwriter with the honey and whiskey voice, known for sparking up on the White House roof? And Wynton Marsalis? Whose concession to the weekend is a two-piece suit? Who is never far from the assertion that Jazz is Great Art? Whose playing is so pure and precise it's barely human? It's true. These men have the musician's love for playing with a true master. Wynton has fun. And Willie swings. "Wynton and Willie." OK. Ain't nobody's business if they do.


Bonnie Prince Billy: Lie Down in the Light
This is what a folk album is supposed to sound like. Even when Will Oldham plugs in, his music still sounds stripped down. The songs are, as on his other work, spare and haunting. They sound older than they are, and the lyrics echo with imagery from early early folklore, religion, myth. It's a lot of freight for a guy with a guitar to carry, but Oldham pulls it off so often it's easy to forget how hard it is to do.



Sonny Rollins: Road Shows, Vol.1
This is one of the best jazz albums to come out in years, I don't mind saying. I'm no expert on the subject. I'm unable to hang with the scribes and scholars of jazz minutiae who know every combo lineup for every sax player since 1948. But I know a master and a genius when I hear one. And I know when said master is playing well. These recordings capture both instances. "Blossom" and "Easy Living" show such supple phrasing, such improvisational power, that I can't listen without a grin. He's like a trapeze artist trying impossible leaps and never missing.

Q-Tip: The Renaissance
I liked Tribe Called Quest, OK? I thought Q-Tip's sly tone, easy flow and clever lyrics made the group, in many ways. He, along with a couple of other artists, showed that hip hop could engage a larger world. On The Renaissance, Q-Tip shows he hasn't lost a step. His storytelling powers are as solid as ever, and his collaborations (especially with Raphael Saadiq on "We Fight / We Love") are smart and occasionally surprising. Only 'Tip could make Norah Jones (I mean, Norah @#$%ing Jones!) sound funky.


Conor Oberst: Conor Oberst
"Cape Canaveral" is stuck in my head and won't go away. ("hey mother interstate / Can you deliver me from evil / Make me honest make me wedding cake? /Atone, I will atone.") The singer/songwriter from Bright Eyes has turned out one of those albums that sounds like what American heartland music is supposed to sound like. It's a road music album, dealing with the kind of themes (Highway shrines where pilgrims disappear...) the genre calls up.



Billy Bragg: Mr. Love and Justice
Yes, he's an angry socialist. Sure, he thinks he's Woody Guthrie and Joe Strummer balled into one. It's OK. He kind of is. And the angry anti-corporate stuff is still there on songs like "The Johnny Carcinogenic Show". But where Bragg is at his best is when he escapes the realm of politics (if such a thing is possible? wink wink) for the personal. "You Make Me Brave" and "I Keep Faith" are as quietly rousing as anything he's ever written.



A special note:

Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
Everybody loves Fleet Foxes. EVERYBODY. Even me. If you't don't at least like Fleet Foxes then please allow me to ask: What the HELL is the matter with you?






Honorable Mention:

Raveonettes: Lust, Lust, Lust (fuzziness. Think VU and Mazzy Star and Jesus and Mary Chain)

M83: Saturdays=Youth (The best of the 80s is back. Updated.).

My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges (I always like everything My Morning Jacket does more about 18 months after the release.)

The Raconteurs: Consolers of the Lonely (Some good songs on it, if you don't mind them sort of blending into each other),

Harvey Milk: Life...The Best Game in Town (The only reason this one didn't make the top ten is that I'm just not the right age for it anymore. This is hard, hard, loud unbridled RAWK, of the kind that would have melted my cortex and blown out my ears when I was an angry 17-year-old tooling around too fast in my dad's Datsun. Now I just hear it and say. "Wow. That's really awesome. But it's hard to write about Petrarch with it going in the background...")

And a note: one of the albums I listened to most this year is my brother's soon to be released Immolate Yourself, by Telefon Tel Aviv. This is easily his best work: melodic, rhythmic, incantatory, visceral. It comes out this week and you should buy it, for it is superb. The only reason it's not atop my list is because it's a 2009 release.