Giovedì 20 Set 2007, 13:42
Finally! It took me a while to get around to this, but here they finally are.
10. Appleseed Cast - Mare Vitalis
Loud post-punk art rock. Think American Football with distortion and screaming. Or maybe a slightly-less-epic, vocalized Explosions in the Sky. I always think of this CD as music for musicians – the way the guitars interact, the way they play with song structures. The lyrics are minimal – you could probably fit the whole album on an index card – but they are enough to paint the picture. Songs like Fishing the Sky and Forever Longing the Golden Sunset are still the highlights of any AC show.
9. Tori Amos - Boys for Pele
This is Tori at her weird, wonderful best. Her earlier albums were maybe a little more lyrically personal, but that was often lost as the songs were locked in verse-chorus-verse monotony. This album shows a commitment to letting songs be what they are and not trying to mold them into normal structures. The lyrics on this album bounce from nonsensical to deeply personal and are always intricate and, well, just weird. Of course Hey Jupiter always breaks everyone’s hearts, but I could listen to the last three tracks on repeat for hours and hours.
8. Elliott Smith – XO
Elliott’s first foray into big budget studio production was a smashing success. His simple, folksy, acoustic songs translated surprisingly well into chamber-pop grandeur. Yes, it has times when the studio work goes over the top (Bled White or A Question Mark), but those are the exceptions, not the rule. The first half is the catchy, melodic stuff that most people like, but I think Elliott is at his best when he’s wallowing in unrepentant, ethereal misery, like on the second half of this album. The album, for me, peaks at the 6-syllable last word at the end of the second chorus of Waltz #1, "Now I never leave my zone \ We're both alone, I'm going home \ I wish I'd never seen your face." Mmmmm.
7. Voxtrot - Three EPs
So this is cheating; this isn’t an actual CD. Before Voxtrot released their first CD (which is great, BTW), they released three EPs: Raised by Wolves, Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, & Wives, and Trouble. I put them all together, in that order, to form a single album. Yes, that’s cheating, but Voxtrot is worth bending the rules over. The first time I heard The Start of Something I was floored. It was the best song I’d heard in years (and still is). The rest of the Raised by Wolves EP was just as good and then the next to were great as well. The songs are catchy, clever, and complicated. The music can probably best be described as aggressive twee pop. Everyone I’ve ever played this band to has loved them. If you’ve never heard these guys, check out their EPs.
6. DJ Shadow – Endtroducing
The best electronica CD ever. Hands down. (I know Shadow hates to be classified as electronica – he has been known to move his CDs from Electronica to Hip-hop at record stores he goes to – but, sorry, putting a down beat on your electronica songs or calling yourself DJ doesn’t make you a hip hop artist.) Emotional, personal, intelligent, intricate. It’s all the things you’ve always thought that electronic music wasn’t.
5. Dave Matthews - Live at Luther College
I’m sure I probably lose all my hipster cool points for having a jam/pop band in my top 5. But whatever. I wavered between putting this album or Under the Table and Dreaming on here - It would have been redundant to put both. I didn’t really want to put a live album on here, but ultimately I decided this was really the better album. This album illustrates a really good point about music – varied instruments and orchestration can be interesting and provide some depth, but all you really need to make good music is a guy and a guitar (OK, there are actually two guys on this CD, but you get the idea).
4. Jeff Buckley – Grace
I took a trip to New Zealand with a friend of mine a few years ago. I spent a week making dozens of marvelous mix tapes (that’s kinda my thing) and loaded my backpack up so that we’d have good music to listen to while we drove around NZ. As it turned out, our rental car had a CD player, not cassette and the only CD we had between us was a Jeff Buckley CD that my friend had in her in Discman. We spent the next two weeks listening to basically nothing but this CD (suffice it to say, radio in rural NZ leaves much to be desired). There’s plenty to the romantic back story of this album – that NZ vacation, the dead-before-his-time singer, the fact that the CD is idolized by us music uber-geeks and pretty much unknown otherwise – but Grace doesn’t really need any of that. The songs are meaningful and accessible, passionate without being melodramatic, complex without being showy. Jeff’s voice is among the best you’ll ever hear and his guitar playing is amazing, if generally understated on his studio tracks. Grace, Hallelujah, and Lover You Should Have Come Over are all in my top 20 or so songs ever. "There’s the moon asking to stay / Long enough for the clouds to fly me away / It’s my time coming I’m not afraid…"
Airy, abstract, artsy. You’ve probably read it all before. I think the thing that really gets me about this album is its ambition. Here’s Radiohead, a quirky but grounded rock band, selling millions of albums, and then this. Pop Kid A and start listening. You get more than two songs in before there is anything that you would recognize as a musical instrument. Thought the album has more conventional songs later on (like the mildly radio-friendly Optimistic), it’s those first two tracks that set the mood that all the other songs are heard with. That being said, like all of Radiohead’s stuff, the songs here would be little more than novelties without Thom Yorke’s beautiful voice tying everything together.
2. Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
This was the album that got me into music. Before I started listening to the Pumpkins, I was listening to things like Garth Brooks and whatever was on VH1. I learned to play guitar from this album. I learned to appreciate music as art from this album. Yes, it has its faults - it is overproduced and overly self-important corporate rock - but every track on this disc is so integrated into my life that I will always love listening to it. The songs are epic and intricate, but still seem personal.
1. Elliott Smith - From a Basement on the Hill
This probably isn’t a surprise for anyone that knows me; Elliott is my most played artist on last.fm by a long shot; I put this album on repeat for about 6 months straight after I heard it the first time. It’s a fantastic album; hell, my son is actually named after Elliott Smith. What makes this album so good? Elliott’s song writing is as good as ever, but it’s taken to another level. The same catchy pop hooks that make his music so addictive can be found on this disc, but unlike XO or Figure 8, they’re paired with jarring, dissonant, noisy instrumentation. The lyrics have a kind of complexity that you only begin to unravel after dozens of listenings and you can discover new gems in the lyrics no matter how long you listen (anyone else heard the “Because I love you” in King’s Crossing?). After his suicide, the lyrics are given a kind of eerie weight and authenticity that they didn’t really need. Does music get any better than this:
"I see you're leaving me
And taking up with the enemy
The cold comfort of the in-between
A little less than a human being
A little less than a happy high
A little less than a suicide
The only things that you really tried
This is not my life
It's just a fond farewell to a friend"