Top Five!

Alright, I know I made you guys wait, but the emails are really piling up. I'm getting phone calls at weird times of the night (like 3:79) and threatening eCards, enough! Top Five Oh Seven, have your fill.


5. Okkervil River's The Stage Names
Who saw this coming? Anyone? Did anybody know these guys were capable of this? Let me just say, I kinda got into Black Sheep Boy after Pitchfork touted it so ringingly. But G Damn. Black Sheep Boy was smart, and yes The Stage Names doesn’t hold a lot of lyrical intrigue that can’t be found on the former. But the sound, they’ve exploded! It’s like listening to a live concert. Their tenuous narration and sentimentality has given way to raucous exploits and bombastic pessimism. What is it about this year? If these guys stop ripping on themselves for a minute, they just might realize how staggeringly brilliant they are. Let’s hope they don’t.
4. Architecture in Helsinki's Places Like This
Pitchfork gave this album a six point four. Are you kidding? I’m not even sure I’m on board if the scale ends at seven. And I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t. The reviewer at one time praises their energy and creativity, and at the same time alludes to himself as the angry dad stepping on legos. Angry dad being not just dad but all old people presumably, and legos being childlike whimsy. I get it. I get it, and I know the problem. This reviewer clearly has never seen these guys live, or at least not since Places dropped. Well I have. And what could seem like a flashy, over engorged B-52s homage, is actually genuine and heart felt. Can they help rocking so hard? They’re not from here, they don’t know our ways. I say give them another chance, Pitchfork. Do it for America.
3. Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Okay, the only, only, only reason Pitchfork liked this album so much better than Architecture’s is because this one’s saad. Well, maybe not sad. But pissed, or dejected, or otherwise enragedly enamored. Hipsters love that crap. So do I, purely by coincidence. And it could be because this album came out almost exactly as I, myself, was feeling somewhat enragedly enamored, but this has got to be my favorite break-up album of all time. The album goes from confused, to angry, to hopelessly hapless, back to angry a few more times, even to sassy and self-righteous. Honestly, it took the exact course of my own emotions. Now, like I said, it could just be serendipity. But at the end of the day, if someone wrote you a letter telling you things like “we fell back to earth like gravity's bitches/Physics makes us all it's bitches.” “How can I explain I need you here and not here too.” “Sometimes I wonder if you're mythologizing me like I do you.” Wouldn’t you take him back? She did. :)
2. The White Stripes' Icky Thump
The first time I heard this album, well at least the first 8 or so tracks in the backseat of the car of this girl I know, I giggled almost the entire time. And no, not because I secretly knew what would happen between me and that girl in the car in the future. Although surely that would have made me giggle. But no, I giggled for different reasons altogether. Everything I heard was so familiar and so new all at once. Every track held a new little secret. It’s the same way I felt listening to each of the former for the first time. Well, except for White Blood Cells, which was unfamiliar as the first I’d heard of them. But I was equally excited and impressed. As much as I think I know about the duo, and as much as I can read about Jack, I still have no idea what’s coming. And that’s damned impressive for two people. And if it weren’t for a quiet little album from South Carolina, I could easily proclaim Icky as my favorite album all year. But alas…
1. Band of Horses' Cease to Begin
When I first heard this album it was late summer going on fall. I didn’t know it at the time, but that happened to be the perfect time to listen to this album. The sun-drenched melodies shone through with the recent slimming of the band, and the result is a perfectly honed masterpiece. Everything All the Time was a wonderful album, and boy was it aptly named. They were all over the place. Band of Horses was pretty apt too, come to think of it. My main problems with the former are purely cosmetic. The storytelling elements were certainly in place, they were just muddled in the tumult of songs with too much meat for their buns. (Is referring to their buns too cheeky?) Cease to Begin’s restructuring begat a newfound earnestness in the music. And lines like “the screen door swayin'/Now baby gimme something to live for.” And “lucky ones are we all ‘til it is over/Everyone near and far/When you smile the sun it peaks through the clouds/Never die for always be around and around and around” only drive that point home. I’ll let you guys know when I get tired of this album.