Top 20 Records of 2008 Countdown
Well, I suppose it’s time for a list, huh?
Lemme preface by saying that 2008 was kind of a crappy year for music. For me it was full of disappointments (musically, I should say); favorites of mine like Marah and Louis XIV put out laughably dreadful records, and folks like The Hold Steady, Paul Weller and Jeff Hanson put out discs that seemed rather uninspired or unexciting. There were a bunch of discs that had a handful of good songs, but failed to deliver even enough kicks to put the album on this list. New Radiant Storm King, Elvis Costello, The Maybes, Airborne Toxic Event…I’m talkin’ boutchoo.
I can’t help but think as I look over my list for this year that only perhaps a handful of the discs on it would crack the top 20 from previous years. Perhaps they would, and I’m just a grumpy old man, which lies as a distinct possibility.
Before proceeding, I once again offer the caveat that these are my favorite discs of the year, the ones that I personally think are the best. You may disagree, and you probably should. I will also this year mention that since my days as a college radio DJ and record store flunky, I’ve always maintained that I am not a music fan. I am a rock and soul fan, and music is a much broader category that includes genres (like folk, opera, and most classical stuff) that just doesn’t interest me much. This year had at least two big releases that seem to be on every critic’s year-end list: Bon Iver’s “For Emma Forever Ago” and Fleet Foxes’ debut disc. Both are very nice records and do what they set out to do very well. I think they’re both folk albums, and both honestly lie so far outside my personal taste that rather than try to shoehorn them into a list here, and rather than try to figure out where they belong, I’ve left them off. Those are lovely records, but for me they have as much to do with rock as Rachmaninoff. You kids get off my lawn, too.
Now that I’ve pissed everyone off right from the get-go, here’s 20 through 16. Mea culpa.
I’ll kick this list off with a piece of music I had no idea how to categorize. I hate to set the precedent of putting a non-longplaying record into this list, but by the same token, the Weather Machines EP is probably the most coherent start-to-finish rock and roll record to come out this year.
We’ve had some great, historical EP’s in the past: The Grifters “Eureka” EP stands as perhaps the single greatest indie rock testament ever released, a perfect encapsulation of the best of what 1990’s lofi could do. U2’s “Under A Blood Red Sky” was a stirring live document of a band on the cusp of massive superstardom. So here’s the thing: I’d put “Bones & Brains” in that same exclusive company. It shows The Weather Machines (who seem to be now just Jason Ward and whomever he enlists as musical help) to be an artist with the potential to be an all-timer.
I always wonder how a band with a stunning debut (and the Weather Machines’ Sounds Of Pseudoscience was fantastic) will follow that up. The first record is always the easiest, you see–you get all sorts of time to plan it out, play songs live and see which ones work the best in front of audiences, critics, and friends. The songs on a debut album are usually the 10-20% best songs a band has written in the time getting the first record out…and then suddenly they’ve got another record to do, and there’s no time and all sorts of pressure. Jason Ward responded to those factors with “Bones & Brains” by firing off five songs that pull some sort of crazy magic trick. They show an artistic growth and maturity beyond anything I thought the Weather Machines capable of. To put it another way, this EP is clearly as much Jason Ward as the debut album, but it also sounds like that band covering someone else. I think I’m babbling, so I’ll try to make some sense: the first three tracks on “Bones & Brains” are the best 1-2-3-4 punch on any record that came out this year, and things don’t go far astray with the closer, either. If Jason Ward is able to deliver a full album of songs like this, we’re looking at one of the most important rock and roll finds to come down the pike in recent memory.
You can hear these songs as well at the Weather Machines Myspace page:
http://myspace.com/theweathermachines (The new songs there are the first three on the EP: “Parts Of Speech”, “202”, and “New Soft Archetype”. That last song is just un-freaking-believably good–when that guitar lick comes in after the second chorus (1:47 or so), it might be my favorite rock and roll moment of the year. The song just defies you to NOT dance around the room to it.)
19. Black Bunny S/T
What was it I was saying before about records that have only a few good songs on them? That sort of applies to the debut album from Brooklyn’s Black Bunny, but doesn’t exactly fit. See, it isn’t that there are bad songs on this album, just that there aren’t any that live up to the stunning opener, a song called “Hero” that somehow manages to sound like “Creep”-era Radiohead covering Calexico or Ennio Morricone. Black Bunny features singer/songwriter Brandon Wilde, who had a stab at the brass ring years ago with a fairly un-noteworthy band called Thisway; he’s scaled things back and clearly developed as an artist.
For one thing, he’s abandoned the strict tenets of his power-pop origins. In addition to the Morricone-flourishes on “Hero”, he’s able to record the best Wilco song Wilco never wrote on “This Is Nowhere”, and he gives “Survival” and “My Time” a gravitas that wasn’t present at any other point in his work. It makes the whole album worthwhile, even if “Hello” is a little bit obvious (try getting that “Getting Better All The Time” hook out of your head, though!) and “Digital Bystander” doesn’t work as well as it might. You’ll keep going back for “Hero” though. That song is one of the best tunes of 2008, a song that just builds and builds and builds to a climax that delivers one of the best goosepimple/hair-on-end moments of the year…and then goes back again on the coda to do it again. Keep an eye on Brandon Wilde and Black Bunny.
“Hero”
The lovely, countrified “Love Unknown”
“This Is Nowhere”
18. Glasvegas, S/T
I’m breaking one of my own rules this year to fill up the top 20 with 20 good records and putting some import-only discs into the mix. Fear not, fellow Yanks–one criteria of mine for this was that the imports in question had to at least be easily available for digital purchase and download. Such is the case with Scotland’s Glasvegas, who have a US label (Sony/Columbia/BMG) who seem determined to botch the domestic release next year of a record that has exploded on the British charts.
What Glasvegas does seems so stupidly obvious that you wonder why they’re the ones with the massive buzz: they draw on inspirations from rock’s classic period–Presley, Spector, Buddy Holly–and then bring the whole thing up to date with a wall of loud guitars that aren’t just fuzzy (like Jesus & Mary Chain) but also jaggedy and challenging. The result is a completely winning debut, a self-assured and timeless bit of rock music that’s built around the same old basic building blocks, but then blasted into a new universe by deft songwriting and challenging arrangements. If the wonderful “Geraldine” sounds like something a number of bands could’ve managed, “Go Square Go” has an all-over-the-place careen to it that shouldn’t work but does, and that’s all Glasvegas.
“Go Square Go”
“Geraldine”
“Daddy’s Gone”
17. Magnolia Summer, Lines From The Frame
So let’s say you’re a fan of the Jayhawks, who managed two or three of the best rustic rock albums of the last dozen years or so until they finally petered out after edging to close to the blandest sins of Crosby, Stills & Nash or the Eagles. If you’re a fan, perhaps it was exciting that this year former Jayhawks Gary Louris and Mark Olsen put out a record together. That disc is pretty good. What I’m here to tell you is that Lines From The Frame by Magnolia Summer is better, and will scratch that Hollywood Town Hall itch better than the originals will.
MagSummer is the vehicle for Undertow Records label manager Chris Grabau; material I’ve heard from him in the past has sounded good, but really didn’t stick with me. Grabau has a wonderful tenor voice like a cool Missouri wind blowing through one of those endless fields along highway 70, and that’s always been an asset for him. On this new record though, he does a very smart thing: he enlists some new blood into the band and brings them front and center. As a result, Kevin Buckley’s strings take over a few songs in breathtaking fashion (“Diminished Returns”, and the glorious final two minutes of “By Your Side”). Kelly Kneiser of Glossary adds some backing vocals (she turns “Birds On A Wire” into a de-facto duet by matching up perfectly with Grabau’s heartfelt vocals over Dave Anderson’s mournful pedal steel). There’s also the indelible stamp of Finn’s Motel frontman Joe Thebeau (who plays guitar in Magnolia Summer and got co-producer credit on this record), who gently urges Grabau to the best hooks he’s ever written. Lines From The Frame is easily the best country-tinged rock album of 2008.
Hear the whole thing here, for free.
16. Hysterics S/T
The hook here is obvious–Hysterics are/were a bunch of guys barely out of high school who’d been playing as a band together since before they could drive. Oliver Ignatius and Charlie Klarsfeld played guitar, wrote, and sang these songs which actually got them a ton of buzz back in 2005 or so….
…and then what? The band got this disc done in 2007 to distribute at shows, but didn’t get it out to the public until 2008, and by that time it seems as if the moment has passed. The band did a little bit of touring and then went on what seems like an indefinite hiatus, with Klarsfeld spending most of his time with the wondeful blue-eyed soul stirrings of The Americans (keep an eye on them!), while Ignatius seems to be working on new songs in relative privacy.
So what do we have here? We’ve still got a wonderful pop album that shows off some amazing talent and chops, no matter the ages of those involved. “Radical Chic” is still one of the best songs you’ll hear this year, and “Mostly Untitled”, “You Tell Yourself It’s Easy”, and “What Swallows A Waterfall” are almost as good. I can’t think that we’ve heard the last of the talented lads from Hysterics, even if it’ll be in other incarnations in the future. Still, grab this worthy document of where they started before they eventually arrive.
The Life And Hard Times Of Guy Terrifico
You there. You like the Flying Burrito Brothers or “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”-era Byrds? Listen up, yo!
Way, way, way back in the 1960’s, a Canadian prairie kid named Jim Jablowski had two pieces of luck hit him–one good, one bad. He won the largest lottery sum every awarded in Canada at that point (almost $8m). Jablowski had wanted to use the money to get a musical career started (he’d written and recorded a few songs of questionable quality, only one of which, a bizarre tune called “Perogie Moon” survives), but at a party at one of many parties to celebrate his good fortune Jablowski was kicked in the head by a rented horse (don’t ask) and nearly killed. Waking up from a coma and seemingly newly-inspired, he decided to continue his music career under the name Guy Terrifico.
Forgive me for referring to Terrifico as Canada’s answer to Gram Parsons, because that isn’t exactly accurate. Sure, Terrifico blended rock and country idioms and sang in a wonderful high lonesome tenor…but Parsons for all his messed-up ways seemed to have his life in better order than Guy Terrifico. Terrifico was a legendary drunk on the order of Hank Williams Sr, showing up for TV shows (like the nationally broadcast Horton Family Jamboree from Nashville) drunk and behaving erratically. Terrifico recruited an ace band including Donnie Fritts, who’d go on to play keys with Dylan, Ray Charles, and most famously Kris Kristofferson, and Ronnie Hawkins, but managed only a handful of singles before a disastrous performance at the Isle Of Wight festival in 1970 sent him into obscurity. Tragically, as Terrifico was launching a comeback a few years later, he was shot dead onstage at a small club in Vancouver…and that should’ve been the end of the story.
…except people began to discover Terrifico’s music posthumously, and a few badly compiled collections sold reasonably well. Fans have rumored for years that Terrifico staged his own death and that he was living comfortably off his remaining lottery jackpot winnings somewhere. A few years ago a demo tape recorded by someone called “Senor Fantastico” started making the rounds of some of the former band members of Terrifico’s old entourage, and the music from “Fantastico” featured a familiar-sounding voice. No word on whether that demo will ever be released or have anything done with it (the demo has been extensively bootlegged at this point), but it did inspire the first comprehensive compilation of Guy Terrifico’s erratic and short-lived music career, and the results are stunning. Here, check out a song:
Yeah, right? Drunken idiot or not, Guy Terrifico had “something” going on. There’s almost a Nick Drake quality to the song, but you can also hear the Gram Parsons thing happening, too (this is the “folkiest” Terrifico track; on others the pedal steel and piano really bring the Parsons/Burrito Brother comparisons to the forefront.) It’d be no stretch to call the remastered rediscovery of Guy Terrifico’s career one of the great treasure finds in country-rock/outlaw country music history. In fact, you could say it loud and clear…if any of the stuff I had just written was true.
It isn’t. The paragraphs above are a brief intro into a Canadian indie-cinema film called “The Life And Hard Times Of Guy Terrifico”, a Spinal Tap-ish mockumentary that does indeed feature folks like Fritts, Ronnie Hawkins, Levon Helm of The Band, Kris Kristofferson, and the legendary Merle Haggard in wonderfully droll cameos. If you’ve no interest in the music or time, a lot of the insider jokes (which are basically, one assumes, people telling stories where “Guy Terrifico” is actually doing something Kristofferson or Haggard or Parsons or Hank Jr. really did back in the day) may leave you scratching your head, but the film has a winning goofiness. At the center of the movie is Guy Terrifico himself, played by former Flashing Lights frontman Matt Murphy (those of you with loooong memories will recall that the Flashing Lights debut album “Where The Change Is” as my favorite of 2000, and I still think it to be one of the best records of the last 10 years). Murphy wrote and recorded a bunch of the music for the film, and the stunning thing is….the music isn’t just good, it’s VERY good. Damn good in fact. Murphy actually plays it pretty straight with the music, leaving the broad humor for the film itself. The soundtrack of the movie has 16 of the best country-rock songs you’re gonna hear this year (ok, it came out in 2007), and I can’t recommend it enough.
More music sample-age:
http://www.myspace.com/guyterrifico
The movie trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHng9OXKtg0
The soundtrack is available at Emusic or also as an mp3 download from Amazon. Highly recommended!
Sorry for the absence, we’re back!
Sorry for taking a month off, but sometimes life (wonderfully) gets in the way. Life is good, basically.
At any rate, I’m hard at work for the annual Pop Narcotic Christmas Mix, which should be coming your way in the next week or so. Also of course is the annual Narc top 20 albums of the year, and I’m working on that.
The Christmas mix is as fun as ever to do. That’s relatively easy.
The top 20 albums though? Not so easy, not this year. Maybe I’m finally an old geezer, but 2008 is the first year in a long time–maybe since 1998 or so–that I’ve really had a rough time coming up with 20 albums that I’d call superlative. I’ve made a trial list, and can’t help feel that perhaps any of the records from last year’s list would top all but a handful on this year’s list. Hmm.
One thing I’m waiting on, kind of. Yesterday I happened to visit the myspace page for The Living Blue, about whom I wrote back in April. At the top of their page they’ve got a blurb with album art for their star-crossed second album “Walk Talk Rhythm Roam” that promises a “Coming Soon!” self-release through iTunes, Emusic, Rhapsody, Amazon mp3, etc. Here’s the thing: if this sucker makes it out in 2008, it’s probably numero uno, or at least in the top 5. I’m sort of dawdling on my list to see whether I can call this a 2008 release or not, or whether instead 2009 kicks off with a bang from these guys.
At any rate, that’s what’s up in Popnarcoticland. We’ll be around more, I promise.
Popnarcotic 