This year has been an incredible year for music. There were so many great albums released it’s difficult to come up with a list that is limited to as many as twenty, but I did it. Here it is:
The Duke Spirit - Cuts Across the Land
Tom Waits - Orphans
Neko Case & Her Boyfriends - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Johnny Cash - American V: A Hundred Highways
Bruced Springsteen - We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions
Cat Power - The Greatest
Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Downpilot - Like You Believe It
G. Love - Lemonade
Alejandro Escovedo - The Boxing Mirror
Johnny Dowd - Cruel Words
Band of Horses - Everything All The Time
Rosanne Cash - Black Cadillac
Bobby Bare, Jr. - The Longest Meow
Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers
The Roots - Game Theory
Sparklehorse - Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain
Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
A few comments about the top ten:
The Duke Spirit tops the list for me because they made a great album that is solid from the first to the last track. The music is built around the smoky, bluesy, sexy vocals of Liela Moss and the torqued-out multi-layered, wailing guitar sounds of Luke Ford and Dan Higgins. This band was obviously influenced by P.J. Harvey’s early stuff, but they’ve managed to take that sound and notch it up.
Tom Waits. What more can I say? It’s Tom, it’s three cd’s of new stuff and some things from the vaults all put together seamlessly. If you’re a fan, you’ve got to have this.
Neko Case just keeps getting better and better. This album features some great musicians, and her voice… well there’s nobody that sings like Neko, and when you add in Kelly Hogan’s backing vocals, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Johnny Cash put out the best album of any dead guy this year. He recorded the vocals over some basic guitar or piano tracks shortly before he died, and Rick Rubin rounded up some musicians and added the music later. Risky thing to do, but this one turned out great. There were a couple other J.C. releases this year that are worth picking up: Personal File, and the At San Quentin (Legacy Edition) box set.
Bruce Springsteen’s new album has “Grammy” written all over it. Who’d have thought that a collection of spontaneous covers of traditional folk songs could be so good?
Chan Marshall is not shy anymore. The Greatest seems like a coming out party for an artist that’s been around a long time. She used Al Green’s backing band on this album, and it’s truly “great.”
Like they said in Doonsebury earlier this year, Pearl Jam has “stopped sucking!”
Sonic Youth’s new album is unusual because it is a collection of songs. Great songs. There isn’t too much noodling on this one, (not that there’s anything wrong with that) it’s mostly made up of great melodies and lyrics and of course that signature sound of theirs. Great road music.
Bob’s new album has “Grammy” written all over it too. I think it’s the best album he’s put out in many years. And no, I won’t pin that down with a best since _____. Fill it in yourself.
Who the heck is Downpilot? I didn’t find out about this Seattle band until this summer after seeing Jesse Sykes at the Showbox. Jesse’s band was performing without it’s talented viola player, Anne Marie Ruljancich, so I asked around and found out that she was playing in Downpilot. I bought their new album and liked it a lot, so I also bought their previous release. Their music kind of reminds me of what R.E.M. was doing back in the I.R.S. years; great melodies, sometimes obscure lyrics, and they have the ability to write a great pop song once and while. Listen to “Antwerp.” The album was produced by Tucker Martine, so if you like the sounds you hear on albums by Jesse Sykes and Laura Veirs, you’ll like this too.
And I have to say something about the best song on Yo La Tengo’s album. “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind” is the best reverberated, noisy, harmonically distorted, squalling feedback fuzz fest I’ve heard since Neil Young’s Weld. I listen to it in my car often–loud. Makes me deaf. You can listen to it on their myspace page.
And don’t forget to tune in to KEXP 90.3 FM all day tomorrow while they play the Top 90.3 albums of the year.
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