Jeff WeissIf you're going to drink one clear cola this year, make it Crystal Pepsi. Please.
Face it, *Nouns* is this decade's *Let it Be* (The Replacements, not The Beatles): A ragtag posse of scruffy dudes sonically illustrating their homes with spectacular tunes and pure passion. Indeed, no band this year, and few bands in recent years, has given music fans so much to be excited about. The reason everyone's searching for the right words to express just why No Age deserves a supplementary chapter in *Our Band Could Be Your Life* isn't because of their setup or ethos or the YouTube videos of Black Flag and The Minutemen they post on their blog, it's due to a shared spirit, one where youthful ardor and sonic ingenuity emphasizes simple messages.
Nowhere is this more evident than on “Sleeper Hold,” a dynamic flurry through corridors of sloppy feedback and cymbal washes, where drummer/singer Dean Spunt spews words that might be describing drugs or sex or both, but ultimately it doesn't matter. A line like “With passion it's true” can describe any number of things–seriously or sarcastically–that the very vagueness of the message gives it an odd power, like a Zen koan or a line from Kabbalah. But this ain't religion, folks. This is the sound of two dudes honed in on the wavelength that connects the sky to the ocean like an azure mirror, a perpetual sunrise/sunset of blissful vistas and the ocean crashing softly on the shore. With passion it's true. With passion it's you.–Tal Rosenberg
Download:
39. Blitzen Trapper–Furr (Sub Pop)
The rare net-hyped band that seamlessly and painlessly swathed their next musical step in all the right blankets: tighter structures, layered melodies that stop short of overkill and “maturity” done right in the form of small, Neil Young-esque folk ditties to cleanse the rock palette (which is more generous here than on last year's more acrid Wild Mountain Nation). They began with a fetish for Pavement's scratchy sidecrawling dubbed through My Morning Jacket weirdness, and came out probable successors to Built to Spill. 13 songs in less than 40 minutes will hit you in the face so many times at such speed you'll need to play it again to remember all the sweet spots. The first one sounds like a countrified Elliott Smith.–Dan Weiss
Download:
MP3: Blitzen Trapper-“Gold for Bread”
38. Gza–Pro Tools (Babygrande)
Conceived as a compilation, Pro Tools is
the Gza's most complete work in years. Ever-abstract and
thought-provoking, Gary Grice's rhyme style has continued to develop
and mature in ways that most vets can only dream about. Not only the
lyrical content stands out, with the GZA ever self-assured and poised,
his Shaolin zen ever cryptic. But RZA and the Wu satellites turn in an
exceptionally strong slate of beats to help buoy the Genius's finely
honed lyrical darts. However, it's the brutal Black Milk-molded “7
Pounds,” that yields the album's finest moment, with Grice bringing
relentless momentum to the iron mic. Indeed, thirteen years after Liquid Swords, Pro Tools proves that the GZA's rhyme thoughts still got tremendous speed.–Dan Love
Download:
MP3: Genius/Gza ft. Masta Killa & Rza-“Pencil”
37. Love is All–100 Things Keep Me Up At Night (What's Your Rupture?)
If Love is All were American, they'd probably be Mika Miko.* After all,
they both boast seething riot grrls as front-women and take their cues
from all the right reference points: The Germs, The Misfits, X-Ray
Spex. Instead, they hail from unlikely musical hotbed, Gothenberg,
Sweden–a land where Jens Lekman can be considered top 40 and even the
punk bands never forget that The Ramones were pop. So it's no
coincidence that 100 Things Keep Me Up At Night, packs
more sticky hooks and rapid locomotion than a Benjamin Franklin's worth
of pixie sticks, despite lyrics that wallow in emotional unrest and
love-lorn laments. I'll assume this is because sprightly russet-haired
frontwoman, Josephine Olausson, is tired of being surrounded by nordic
platinum-haired giants. Her revenge? Writing the Swedish post-punk
version of “99 Problems” as run through the filter of “99 Luft
Balloons. “–Jeff Weiss
* Who are good, just significantly rawer and less poppy than Love Is All.
Download:
MP3: Love Is All-“Wishing Well”
36. Beach House–Devotion (Car Park)
Between the gauzy glacial guitars, the shaken percussion, the rusting boardwalk organs, and frail, Faberge vocals, Devotion manages
to win the 2008 Panda Bear Award for Album That Fucks Up the Most
Futons in Ft. Greene.* It's R&B for indie kids–you just have to
listen closely, preferably with some $700 headphones and a trust fund.
Rhythms unravel slower than the waltz, but at heart, they're hot,
buttered soul. Or in the case of Vassar graduate and lead singer,
Victoria LeGrand, steamed soy margarine soul.
Legrand's wraith-like vocals sound woozy and desolate; they're deeply
moving but never saccarine, barely there and yet overwhelming. The
aesthetic signifiers are different. There's no horn section, the gospel
influence is absent and the swing is more drugged-out Brave New World
than New Jack Swing. But don't be fooled, at its core, there's as much
rhythm and blues to Devotion as to another great song whose name it shares. Or, this one, for that matter.–Jeff Weiss
* Except for maybe Fucked Up.
Download:
MP3: Beach House-“Gila”
35. El-P Wearegoingtoburninhellmegamixx 2 (Def Jux)
Hanging out with El-P is either a real drag or a total religious
experience. After all, Jamie Meline spends the vast majority of the
tour-only, Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx2, spitting
jeremiads in his self-anointed role as funcrusher plus of hip-hop. An
hour of trademark, synthetic, buzz-from-hell instrumentation and
dystopic, off-kilter rhymes, the mixtape is mostly a vehicle for El-P
to continue to prove that he's the most original producer alive. On the
scorching “Drunk On The Edge Of A Cliff”, El-P does a warped Neptune
impression, taking their Clipse collaboration “I'm Not You” and
splattering it with enough 8-bit video game blips and chaos to
constitute an apocalyptic anthem. The mind of El-P must be scary, but
as long as he continues viewing humans through his paranoid lens,
consider the world gifted. –B.J. Steiner
Download:
ZIP: El-P-Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx 2 (Left-Click)
34. The Black Keys–Attack and Release (V2)
It took Ohio duo The Black Keys to find a good use for the too
frequently anodyne gravedigger, Danger Mouse. The producer's
predilection for vintage aesthetics, as seen on his less-than-stellar
knob-twiddling for Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley, more often results in
him replicating museum pieces rather than engaging in the inspired
revivals of lost ideals with which he is frequently credited. On Attack and Release,
however, DM helped the Black Keys capture the energy and excitement of
sixties-era blues rock without reducing the exercise to renaissance
fair play-acting. The Black Keys remember one thing about the blues
that so many contemporary copyists forget: it's about rhythm, not
authenticity. Attack and Release struts and swaggers like
hip-hop; its addled crawl is as effective riding music as anything
dreamed up by a sub-Mason-Dixon rapper in '08. The sound is so
enjoyable that The Black Keys hardly needed to come up with
well-written songs to accompany it–but they did anyway. Of the 11
top-notch tunes here, none is better than “Strange Times,” a pop song
as direct and immediately appealing as anything currently blasting out
of commercial radio.–Jonathan Bradley
33. Zilla Rocca–Bring Me the Head of Zilla Rocca (Beat Garden)
Why is Bring Me the Head of Zilla Rocca one of the best albums of 2008?
Because along with Nas' The Nigger Tape, El-P's Megamixxes, Wale's The Mixtape About Nothing, and
yes, Lil Wayne's 3,212,211 tapes, Zilla's first solo mixtape is one of
the first to grasp the potential of the medium. Specifically, that it
can be more than a hodge-podge of freestyles, skits and collected
feature appearances. Because its title is inspired by Peckinpaugh's
bleakest film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Because
Zilla dodges the dilemma of underground white rappers–who typically
fall into two lanes: ironic, “clever” and non-threatening (MC Paul
Barman, Grand Buffet, Conor Oberst) or overcompensating and dull (Half
of Eastern Conference Records, Haystak, David Silver). Bring Me the Head of Zilla Rocca is
smart without being soft, cool without being cloying; the beats are
on-point, the punch-lines are ready to rewind. And its album cover is
better than your favorite rapper's. –Jeff Weiss
* Conflict of interest to be noted: Zilla writes for my website. That doesn't mean his album isn't great. Download it–it's free. If you dislike it, I'll buy you a six-piece chicken Mcnuggets.
Download:
ZIP: Zilla Rocca-Bring Me the Head of Zilla Rocca (Left-Click)
32. Hot Chip–Made in the Dark (Astralwerks)
If we were going to forget a Hot Chip record, couldn't it have been Coming on Strong? Please? Instead, Made in the Dark,
released in early February, seemed–if not necessarily overlooked–then
too quickly shelved by those of us with a whole fresh year's worth of
new music to anticipate. Lost in that winter spell though was another
very good Hot Chip album, perhaps the one which most nimbly blended
their cheeky songwriting with their arch brand of dipshit hedonism (the
dancing side, silly). If the Knife brought trance-synths to gloomy
Swedish pop, then Hot Chip put it to more jubilant uses on Made in the
Dark. Listen to “Shake a Fist,” for example, where their deep synth
smears and stern rhythms form an absurdly infectious loser's anthem, or
“One Pure Thought,” a stout guitar-led groove that seems almost
impossibly ravenous in how it slowly consumes a track so full of
forward motion. In looking back though, Hot Chip's most defining
musical point of the year–and perhaps my favorite few minutes of
sound–was “Don't Dance”'s trance coda, a simple breathtaking moment of
foolish, braindead glee. For a band that's often been too
merry-pranksterish both lyrically and musically, it's great to hear
them set such a clear mark and nail it: a minute of glow-sticking so
dead of higher consciousness you have only to nod your head in time,
concussed, newly delighted.–Derek Miller
31. Brightblack Morninglight–Motion to Rejoin (Matador)
There's gospel and then there's gutter happy Hallelujah. The duo of
Rachael Hughes and suitably-named Nathan Shineywater most certainly
sing in the tone of the latter, though it's often hard to tell from the
surface for just how slow and sludgy their swampsongs are to take
shape. Toe the edge and you'll note it's one marked by a kind of
clear-as-river-mud spiritualism, a warm soil-suck earthiness that's
part tattered hymn and part porchfront blues. Subtle, slow-take anthems
that snaked odd shapes in the bayou-dew. In fact, Brightblack Morning
Light mark the kind of fever-spirit godspell you'd find nudged under
the benches of a two-seat pew on many a Highway 66 on stained
parchment. But on the duo's third album proper, Motion to Rejoin,
they've arguably made their most beautiful statement of artistic
fatigue to date. They've added soulful background singers–a touch of
true gospel–to round out a sound that sometimes felt just too
threadbare. What strange church songs now, what slurry bed-hair sense
for torchlight hours. So beautiful, so narcotized, such belly-warm
wineskin music. Let's lie flat on our backs and never move again.–Derek Miller
Download:
MP3: Brightblack Morninglight-“Hologram Buffalo”
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