The much-anticipated list of my favorite albums of 2009. These are not necessarily the best, just personal favorites. What should I check out that I may have missed?
Albums
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
The Antlers - Hospice
The Avett Brothers - I And Love And You
Bombadil – Tarpits and Canyonlands
Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
Conor Oberst and The MysticValley Band - Outer South
The Dangerous Summer - Reach For the Sun
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Up From Below
Florence and the Machine - Lungs
Fun. - Aim and Ignite
Girls - Album
Ida Maria - Fortress Round My Heart
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Kevin Devine - Brother’s Blood
Langhorne Slim - Be Set Free
Manchester Orchestra – Mean Everything to Nothing
Matt and Kim - Grand
Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk
Mountain Goats - Life of the World to Come
M. Ward - Hold Time
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Passion Pit - Manners
Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
P.O.S. - Never Better
Set Your Goals - This Will Be the Death of Us
Silversun Pickups - Swoon
St. Vincent - Actor
Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer
The Thermals - Now We Can See
Various Artists - Dark Was the Night
Weatherbox – The Cosmic Drama
We Were Promised Jetpacks – These Four Walls
Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
The xx - XX
Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz
Albums in blue indicate they are my Top 5
Top 5 EPs
Beirut - March of the Zapotec/Holland
Bon Iver - Blood Bank
The Drums – Summertime!
Modest Mouse No One's First, And You're Next
No Age – Losing Feeling
Best Production
Miike Snow - Miike Snow
Memorable Singles that Didn’t Make My Other Lists
Big Pink – “Dominos”
Lilly Allen – “I Do Not Hook Up”
Peter Bjorn and John – “Nothing to Worry About (Remix ft.Wale)”
Overlooked Albums from 2008
Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances
The Tallest Man on Earth – Shallow Grave
From when I saw Animal Collective at the Troubadour on 2/27/09
Switch to Google Chrome: I've been using Google Chrome since it was first released and I still think its by far the best web browser. Google Chrome now supports extensions, see check out a list of the top 10 Google Chrome extensions.
Paste (one of my favorite publications) has a quick history of the evolution of the "hipster" during the 2000s. It's funny, but also a little scary because of how accurate it is. Check it out.
Came across this great comic explaining 15 things worth knowing about coffee.
A video combining my love for indie rock with Jason Segel. Segel came out to do an original song at the Swell Season show last night at the Wiltern. I wish I had gone. You may know Jason Segel from How I Met Your Mother, Freaks and Geeks, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You may know the Swell Season from the musical Once.
Last month's Hip-Hop Week saw me highlight a handful of my favorite rappers and hip-hop artists. This week, I'd like to highlight another genre that I don't listen to frequently, but every once in awhile a band is so good that I just want to share.
Although pop-punk doesn't have a large presence in my daily listening habits, it used to dominate. I remember being in middle school and high school and blasting nothing but stuff like Blink-182, New Found Glory, Something Corporate, The Startling Line (note: the last 4 bands were all on Drive-thru records. So sad how far Drive-thru's star has fallen). Most pop-punk these days I just can't relate to and it sounds like it has all been done before. However, this week I'll explore some bands that just capture my ears and heart.
First-up: You, Me, and Everyone We Know. This unsigned band has self-released two EPs for free (legally download their latest uploaded by the band themselves here). They put on an amazing live show and the lead singer sounds great live.
The band has been compared to Say Anything, so it is only fitting that Max Bemis of Say Anything fell in love with the band and provided guest vocals at the end of "I Can Get Back Up."
Also, I'd suggest checking out Weezer's AOL sessions. While Weezer hasn't really impressed me since Pinkerton (except for their live shows), these 5 videos are pretty fun:
1. "I'm Your Daddy" featuring Kenny G 2. "Can't Stop Partying" featuring Chamillionaire 3. "If You're Wondering If I Want You To (I Want You To)" featuring Sara Bareilles 4. "Brain Stew" Green Day cover with some mean piano-playing 5. "Butterfly" featuring a harp.
Instead of my normal routine of listening to NPR on my commute to work, I decided to pop in Cassadaga by Bright Eyes to relive the Monsters of Folk show last Sunday.
The second to last track, "I Must Belong Somewhere," was never a stand-out favorite of mine on the record. However, this morning, I found it really thought-provoking and moving. Since high school, I've gone back and forth between wanting to move [current candidates: Boston, Washington (D.C.) New York, Portland (OR), Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Boulder/Denver (CO)] and stay in California where I have a good network of friends. After I graduated and was thinking of doing fellowships across the country, I struggled with this same question.
This song today brought up a lot of emotion and I'm afraid that it may just be me and may have just been a temporary affinity for this song, but I just had to share it and ask:
Do you think you'll eventually stay fairly near to where your family is and/or where you grew up. or do you feel you belong somewhere else?
I had a great weekend for music. Besides the Bon Iver cemetery concert a couple of weeks back, I haven't been going to concerts much lately. This weekend, I had two in a row. On Saturday, I saw Manchester Orchestra and Brand New at the Hollywood Palladium.
Half way through Manchester Orchestra's set, in addition to reconfirming my belief that they are my favorite band currently by putting on another amazing live show, I actually had the urge to drop everything in my life and get involved in the music industry. The impulse to follow the band around and dedicate my career to music eventually faded, but I was left with some great memories of a terrific show. Brand New's new and raw material also translated quite well live. Much better live than on record. I prefer Brand New's slower songs, but I did enjoy the effort they put in with crazy videos going on during the new songs like "Vices" below.
One of my favorite new Manchester Orchestra songs:
It wasn't the best Brand New show I've been to (the crowd was pretty bad) and I much prefer seeing MO headline, but I thought it was an awesome night. However, Sunday proved even better. The Monsters of Folk at the Greek Theatre was one of my favorite concerts in recent memory. 2 1/2 hours of Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes), M.Ward (of She & Him fame), and Jim James (My Morning Jacket) playing Monsters of Folk songs as well as playing songs by each other's bands. What a great weekend.
In the same vein as my Wale recommendation, today I also want to talk about a mixtape. Everyone knows the name M.I.A. now because of "Paper Planes." Before a fully-pregnant M.I.A. swaggered at the Grammy's with Kanye and Lil Wayne, there was Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1. This mixtape by British rapper M.I.A. and American producer Diplo is one of my favorite CDs to listen to while driving.
On this mixtape, Diplo takes M.I.A.'s vocal tracks from her yet-to-be-released debut album Arular and mixes it with just about everything: The Bangles, Jay-Z, Ciara, Brazilian baile funk, reggaeton, etc... You can stream the whole thing on youtube or a quick internet search will help you find a place to download it.
Today I want to plug Mike Skinner, better known as The Streets. The British rapper has used the moniker since 2000 and has released 4 albums, with one more to go.
The Streets debut album, Original Pirate Material was released in 2002 with the standout track "Let's Push Things Forward:"
In 2004, the Streets released one of my favorite recrods, hip-hop or otherwise. A Grand Don't Come for Free is a concept record that focuses equally on the big events and the mundane thoughts of an everyman in England.
From the Pitchfork review: "On A Grand Don't Come for Free...Mike Skinner audaciously weaves an 11-track narrative over an often bare and inert musical backdrop, one that acts more like a film score than the foundation of a pop record. The plot is pretty bare-bones: boy loses money, boy meets girl, boy loses girl. But by focusing as much on the minutiae of life as on its grand gestures, the impact of Skinner's album-- essentially a musical update of 'The Parable of the Lost Coin' peppered with Seinfeld's quotidian anxiety and, eventually, a philosophical examination of Skinner's lifestyle and personal relationships-- transcends its seemingly simple tale."
A Grand is by far my favorite The Streets album. His third album, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, focused more on his thoughts on fame, and while solid (and giving us a fun first single about celebrity dating with "When You Wasn't Famous"), it didn't resonate as much. Same story with his fourth album Everything Is Borrowed. Skinner has announced that the next The Streets album, 2010's Computers and Blues, will also be the last under the Streets moniker. He has been tweeting tracks that may or may not be on the album since April.
It appears that unintentionally, each day my pick is someone progressively more widely-known. Today is Maryland-based (and son of Nigerian parents) Wale, but he's associated with Washington, D.C. He's been steadily building up a fan base by releasing 5 mixtapes for free since 2006. His first album is supposed to come out next month.
My favorite mixtape by Wale is Mixtape About Nothing. You can download it for free on his myspace. As the title indicates, it is inspired by Seinfeld, a show that Wale says he has seen every episode of 30 times. Wale tackles big issues while peppering the mixtape with clever references and even an appearance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. One of the stand-out tracks is "The Kramer," where he addresses Michael Richards racist tirade at the Laugh Factory.
Another personal favorite track is "The Perfect Plan" (noticing a pattern with the track titles? Seinfeld fans will). I even included this song on a mixtape I made for my students about the music industry.
Since embedding for this video is disabled, go here to check out the music video of Wale's "Chillin" featuring Lady GaGa.
The second hip-hop artist I'd like to feature is Astronautalis. This Jacksonville-born, Seattle-based rapper blew me away with his third record, Pomegranate. Produced by John Congleton (Modest Mouse, Explosions in the Sky, Mountain Goats, Polyphonic Spree), it blends hip-hop with folk sensibilities and great storytelling.
Pomegranate has been described as historical fiction, "taking us from the life of a desperate conman, to a pre-Ian Fleming tale of an espionage during the Opium Wars, then to the heresy trial of William Robertson Smith, to Washington on the Delaware." I highly recommend this album if you want to try something in the hip-hop world but with a style all its own.
Anyone want to go to Copenhagen to see the "Charles Darwin-inspired opera called Tomorrow, in a Year featuring new music from Swedish innovators the Knife?"
I wish I knew about the Warped Tour earlier in my adolescence. I didn't go to many concerts until maybe my senior year of high school. By the time I realized that going to a concert was one of the better ways to spend my nights, the Warped Tour was already past its prime. However, for the few years that I was into a lot of the bands in the scene, I really looked forward to the Warped Tour.
It was cheap (around $20 for 12 hours of music)
Saw a ton of bands that I loved & there was always someone worthwhile playing
Checked out new bands that I started to hear buzz about
Bought a lot of cheap merch
Had the opportunity to meet a lot of great bands
Being in Los Angeles, I was also spoiled because the tour would start in Pomona in June and end in August in Los Angeles. I would go once in the beginning of the summer and once at the end, normally with some different bands playing since most artists could no longer afford to dedicate the whole summer to the relatively low paying tour.
However, starting last summer, I couldn't justify going to Warped Tour. There were a few bands that I would have loved to see (Say Anything, Against Me!, Motion City Soundtrack, Rise Against, Set Your Goals), but it wasn't worth dealing with the annoying crowd that Warped now attracts just to wait around all day to see a few great bands play 30 minute sets.
I was hoping that Warped would get back on track this year and I could enjoy another day of sun and music. When the line-up was announced, I realized that I would never go to Warped again.
While there are a few good bands playing again this summer, I would find sitting through sets of 90% of the bands on the bill torturous. Just one glance at my iPod will show you that my tastes have changed somewhat drastically over the past year or two. Since my iPod can only hold 80 gbs, I am constantly taking off punk/scene music and replacing it with "indie"/Stereogum/Pitchfork music (it pains me to use labels).
While I admit that I've just been outgrowing a lot of the music, I believe that there still some bands making great music that belong to that scene. Thrice, Brand New, Moneen, The Gaslight Anthem, Weatherbox, Lydia, and Straylight Run all come to mind.
The scene, however, I believe is pretty poisoned at the moment and only getting worse. Instead of going on a rant, I will just mention a few bands that are on this year's Warped Tour, the famed "punk rock" traveling festival.
1. Millionaires
This band was actually featured and recommended by Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman in May. Three dumb, talentless girls from Huntington Beach released their EP "Just Got Paid, Let's Get Laid" after Gabe Saporta of Cobra Starship (more on him later) recommended them to Pete Wentz. They have no musical talent, terrible lyrics, an atrocious message, and I for one do not find anything entertaining about two underage sisters (yes, they are sisters) humping each other (about a minute into this video
Lyrics from "I like Money:" "Cigarettes, 80 proof Take my picture, I'm so damn cute! Fake ID's, lots of cash Race that Benz, we go real fast 2 a.m. and I'm still goin' Pour my drink, it's overflowin'! Take me home, rough me up No one's here so lets just fuck!"
The members and their official musical duties: Se7en (scream vocals, rap vocals) Mikl (clean vocals, autotune vocals) Phat J (synths, backup vocals, backup screams and growls) Antz (fog machine and lights)
3. Jeffree Star Video at the Pomona stop of Warped Tour last week:
4. 3OH!3
I first heard 3OH!3's hit single "Don't Trust Me" when I accidently didn't put in a CD fast enough when I got into the car and heard this song playing on KROQ. When I heard the following lyrics, I thought it just had to be a terrible song made by jokester KROQ DJs Kevin and Bean.
"Don't trust a ho. never trust a ho. won't trust a ho. cause the ho won't trust me.
Shush girl, shut your lips, do the helen keller and talk with your hips. i said shush girl, shut your lips."
When I was at a party and this song played back to back with the equally horrible Metro Station's "Shake It," a little part of me died inside and I knew I was at the wrong party.
5. Aiden
I had to sit through this band opening at a show a few years ago. Now I do my research and make sure that the opening bands are not going to sound like Aiden. And yes, that is Jeffree Star in the video.
I could go on, but just finding videos for these songs are making me a little depressed. When even talented musicians like Gabe Saporta, who created the amazing album Forget What You Know with the band Midtown, release songs liks this under the name Cobra Starship and they become more popular than anything he's done before, it makes me glad that I've been moving away from this scene and discovering great new bands. At least I can rest assured knowing that The National or Bon Iver won't ever be playing Warped, therefore making me choose between sitting through terrible bands to see them or missing the only opportunity of the summer to see them. Thankfully there are still bands (and fans) out there that care more about the music than the image.
For the past week, I've really only listened to two albums on repeat. They are the new Manchester Orchestra album, Mean Everything to Nothing, and the self-titled album by Titus Andronicus.
While I was trying to figure out why I couldn't stop listening to both bands, I started to realize the similarities. Both singers are my age, but feel worn out by the world. While taking different approaches, both TA and MO discuss crises of faith, existentialism, and finding their places in the world. Also, both bands put on amazing live shows and sound best cranked up very loud.
Here are some lyrics by Titus Andronicus that have provoked some thought:
My Time Outside the Womb
"The first thing you see is the light. Then, you focus on a man in a mask with a knife as he cuts you away from everything you thought you knew about life.
And now you’re in your mother’s arms, wrinkled and wet. You’re gonna spend the rest of your life trying to hard to forget that you met the world naked and screaming, and that’s how you’ll leave it"
No Future
“If you’re weary, I don’t mind sharing the load, just keep me some company on the road. All I’ve got is a bottle that I ought to leave alone, but it’s the only thing that I can call my own.
So I’m saying goodbye, and no, I won’t forget to write. It’s just been too long racing towards a yellow light, and I know that I say this every night, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired of life”
“Because I’ve been waiting all year for the temperature to drop, but now I’ve got a fever and I don’t know how to make it stop."
Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ
"Now the way we hold each other so tight would look more like a noose if held up to the light because we betray each other in dreams every night."
Albert Camus
“But underneath it all, there is an apathetic heart of gold"
“Because the more we think, the less it all makes sense, tonight we will drink to our general indifference.”
Upon Viewing Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
"I was born into self-actualization, I knew exactly who I was, but I never got my chance to be young."
Titus Andronicus
"Throw my guitar down on the floor. No one cares what I’ve got to say anymore. I didn’t come here to be damned with faint praise. I’ll write my masterpiece some other day.
Fuck everything, fuck me.
I’m repeating myself again. Innovation, I leave to smarter men. Pretty melodies don’t fall out of the air for me; I’ve got to steal them from somewhere."
There is a Japanese video game called RapeLay. It is simply a "rape simulator." Horrifying and fascinating (once you read about the cultural backdrop in Japan). Ok, mostly just horrifying and saddening. Read about the game if you are so inclined. I hope my friend Anna is being careful on those trains!
A sad story must be balanced with something awesome. Enjoy the new Manchester Orchestra music video that was just released less than half an hour ago.
It's officially a new month, so I decided to make a short playlist of some music I've been listening to. This time I limited myself to only 13 songs, but will hopefully be making these more frequently. I guess I was inspired to make another playlist because two of my most anticipated albums leaked today: Cursive and Kevin Devine.
