My Top Ten of '08 (for The Cornellian)

Though 2008 saw the release of several high-profile and heavily hyped new albums from the likes of Fleet Foxes, No Age, and Vampire Weekend, it occurred to me as I was compiling this list that the majority of my favorite albums from 2008 were made by veterans of all sorts of fringe music scenes from the past 20 years. It was a good year, I think, for comebacks, although their aesthetic success in my mind doesn’t necessarily match up to the sort of critical and commercial success I think should be bestowed on these ten albums. I call 2008 the year of the rock vets resharpening their tools and making sounds that seem to transcend both what they were capable of in the past as well as the majority of popular sounds in this past year. Unfortunately, Axl Rose is not among them.

10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash. Malkmus’ former band, Pavement, had a slight predilection towards lengthy jamming onstage, but they were diplomatic enough of a band most of the time to always make pop songcraft their primary focus (which is why the rock journalist tag of Pavement being the “indie Grateful Dead” never really stuck). Since then, Malkmus has forged a decent enough solo career that has veered increasingly into aimless but often wonderful noodling. Real Emotional Trash is the apotheosis of Malkmus’ gift as an improviser, which is partly why I wasn’t very impressed with the album the first few times I heard it, being predisposed towards ignoring the songs. As far as these things go, Real Emotional Trash is extremely listenable and tuneful, and has a good half-dozen or so incredible guitar solos from Malkmus himself. I don’t believe, after this album, that anyone can argue that Malkmus isn’t one of the key guitarists of this or any era.

9. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion. This is another album I didn’t really like at first, but subsequent listens have proved to me how wrong I was, initially. While I’m not a hardcore Magnetic Fields fan and I’m not one of those people that listens to the entirety of 69 Love Songs on a regular basis, this album struck me for several reasons. First, and most importantly, as is suggested in the title, this is a very distorted album with a lovely sort of fuzz pallor. Yet it’s a very simple sort of distortion, not heavily processed like you find on lots of hard rock albums, but more of a less abrasive, more fuzzy sort of distortion. The album is most directly comparable to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and several of the songs here are perhaps even better. “California Girls” and “Too Drunk To Dream” are just two songs that make it clear that when Stephin Merritt feels like it, he can produces dozens of good songs in a very short period of time.

8. Nine Inch Nails, The Slip. No one realizes this, but Trent Reznor keeps making albums that are better in almost every way than Nine Inch Nails during their mid-90s heyday. I believe that, partially inspired by Radiohead’s model for making music with In Rainbows, Reznor was inspired to make the kind of music he wanted to make, which in this album results in probably the most abrasive and most metal-oriented album to date. Unlike many notorious pop perfectionists, Reznor’s music is capable of sounding airy and unpolished, and is all the better for it. The best thing about this album, though, was the price: nobly, Reznor decided to put the album for free online as Radiohead did. The results were far less successful, which is a shame, because we need to support artists like Reznor. I never thought I’d say that.

7. Portishead, Third. The last Portishead album to be released was their self-titled album, in 1997. Since then, main instrumentalist and producer Geoff Barrow became horrified to find that Portishead’s debut album Dummy, once considered the paragon of the musical sub-genre known as trip-hop, had become an easy listening standard that people would play in massage parlors. At the same time, he became witness to a British club scene that had become sanitized and robbed of most of its vitality. When Third came out, no one was sure whether or not Portishead would fall on its face using the same tropes it did a decade earlier. No worries, though: Portishead managed to retool their sound while keeping the spy movie theatrics and adding a heavy industrial beat to awesomely intense songs like “Machine Gun.” Of course, that’s not the only trick they utilize, and as a songwriter and singer, Beth Gibbons continues to get better. This album also has one of the best ukulele interludes I have ever heard.

6. Jay Reatard, Matador Singles ’08. I’m not sure that this counts as an album proper, but it’s probably too good to not mention. Jay Reatard, real name Jay Lindsay, is another sort of post-punk renaissance man who has involved himself with all sorts of different garage and punk groups; his recent solo album Blood Visions was so good that I wasn’t sure how he would be able to top the level of quality of that album’s noisy and devilishly vulgar garage revivals. The new collection of singles, which were released over the last couple years on Matador Records, shows a slightly more composed and reflective Jay Reatard, even if that isn’t really saying much. Many of the songs don’t really rock at all, but stand out as incredibly moving and provocative (and certainly well-sung) pop songs. I’m not sure that this is the direction I would like to see Reatard go in in the future, but these singles make a nice detour and they are almost uniformly of high quality.

5. Q-Tip, The Renaissance. Q-Tip’s first album in nine years is appropriately titled: most of us were aware of his verbal dexterity, but he has also blossomed into an excellent producer during those years, and on The Renaissance, every song is produced by Q-Tip, save for one track, “Move,” which was produced by the late J. Dilla. Unfortunately, the rap music industry is particularly uninterested in its veteran players, no matter how vital they may still be, so The Renaissance didn’t get nearly the play it should have. That is a shame, because the album is almost completely excellent from beginning to end, and it does so partially by defying our expectations about rap music as well as what we expect from Q-Tip. For instance, a song like “Life is Better,” which has Norah Jones singing the hook, seems at first to be one of those saccharine “I’ll Be There For You”-sort of love songs. Instead, the hook leads into one long verse from Q-Tip where he discusses his influences as a rap artist as well as paying homage to a new breed of rappers. Similarly, a song like “Gettin’ Up” sounds at first like a sex goof, but then it becomes a somewhat moving and powerful meditation on the spiritual goodwill that can result from sex and intimacy. The production is uniformly great and Q-Tip’s voice is one of the most pleasurable things to listen to, no matter what he’s saying. And just prematurely: don’t accuse me of tokenism. If there were more decent rap albums I liked, I’d put them here.

4. TV On The Radio, Dear Science. Having now become the leading lights on the New York scene, I wasn’t sure what could be expected from TV On The Radio anymore. Dear Science was the band’s opportunity to show the country that they were now officially one of the great album bands of their era, and I believe they succeeded with perhaps their best album to date. The usual production tricks—loud, booming polyrhythms that utilize acoustic and electric drums simultaneously, non-descript background ambient noises, heavily processed guitar effects—are all there, but there seems to be a degree more of instrumental interplay between the members of the band. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone trade off singing songs like Strummer and Jones, and in songs like “Dancing Choose” and “Shout Me Out,” you see a band chipping away at the foundations of their own song structures, creating mutated, dilapidated sound-creatures on a conducive yet organic assembly line.

3. Marnie Stern, This is It… An unlikely success story by any standard, Marnie Stern has managed to make an album that is simultaneously more harmonically expressive than most of her math/noise peers as well as more tuneful and interesting than most indie-pop albums. Stern is also, of course, an amazing guitarist, and one of the few that still manages to do anything interesting with fret-tapping techniques. However, the guitar theatrics are never merely theatrical, and in fact create a sort of hypnotic tape-loop effect that characterizes her songs as slightly off-kilter if at the same time surprisingly pleasant to listen to. Stern’s voice is an acquired taste, but I think I’ve got it by now, even if her lyrics for the most part aren’t the most coherent part of her act. Nevertheless, Marnie Stern represents the future: a fusion of mathy guitars and pleasant melodies.

2. Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life. A Canadian hardcore punk band with an unfortunate name, Fucked Up basically surprised everyone with their unconventional method of piling on guitar overdubs for The Chemistry of Common Life. Ostensibly a hardcore album with a suitably abrasive lead vocalist who calls himself Pink Eye, it’s a piece of music covered with layers of sound, a style utilized by My Bloody Valentine but in this context can be compared more accurately to Smashing Pumpkins. It’s also rare among hardcore albums for several other reasons: it starts with a long flute solo, for instance, and the lyrics often deal with themes of religious alienation and spiritual longing, which are hardly the most apropos of hardcore subject matters. The larger point, however, is that the music present is heavy and thick with overdubs but also uniformly good, and listening to the entire thing at a loud volume (especially "Black Albino Bones") is an almost unreasonably cathartic experience. Some hardcore kids might not like the direction Fucked Up is going in, but it’s the perfect type of music for someone like me, I guess.

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! If there was a fear that Nick Cave was putting his renaissance man image in jeopardy by spreading himself too thin (not only writing and performing music but also publishing two novels and having a screenplay filmed), those fears were quickly put to rest by Cave’s side project Grinderman, which involved only the core members of the Bad Seeds and put made Cave relevant again. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Is his first album back with the Bad Seeds after the Grinderman project, but it’s encouraging to see that he’s kept much of the Grinderman spirit alive, transposing it to songs with slightly more expansive orchestration but are still, at their very core, gritty, dirty rock songs. It is, to my mind, the best album of 2008: an almost unparalleled aural experience that pays tribute to its twin totem roots of American blues music and the experimental path initially forged by the Velvet Underground, whose songs are heavily referenced throughout the album.

I like to think that the albums I love most are the ones that I judge on a most micro level, where I can recall with fondness not only specific songs but also specific parts of songs that blew my mind when I first heard them and caused me to repeat them endlessly. Here is a short list of some of those moments: Cave’s keyboard solo right after the break towards the end of “Today’s Lesson,” a noise so simultaneously cacophonous and tinny that it’s almost reveling in its “Nuggets”-like splendor; the incomparably sexy (there’s no other word to use, really) drumming in the post-apocalyptic composition “Moonland”; The part in “Albert Goes West” when Cave joins the chorus of “sha-la-la” vocals, which is followed by two mind-busting tom beats; The lyrics for “We Call Upon the Author,” which to my knowledge is the greatest song ever written about literary criticism (with the line, “Prolix! Prolix!/Another pair of scissors you can’t fix” becoming an anthem for the ages); the beginning of “Midnight Man,” which manages over a reciprocal bass line to make a noise approximating an orchestra warming up utilizing just a guitar and keyboard. However, I think the best song, and one of the best songs on the year, is “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl),” a distillation of all the themes we expect from the new Nick Cave, now an aging, sexually-frustrated lothario who is also extremely self-aware about such matters. It’s an incomparable hard rock composition, with an ascending keyboard line of an almost absurd simplicity, and it also allows the lead singer to vent the vapidity of his maleness. If nothing else, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! has the power to unite sexually and emotionally maladjusted boy-men of any race or creed.