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Based off of an idea from the indispensable Idolator, let's do this for the weekend.Out down your favorite album for every year that you were born. Yes, you'll figure out how damn young I am.
1988-Sonic Youth : Daydream Nation
1989-Pixies: Doolittle
1990:Happy Mondays: Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches
1991: Fugzazi-Steady Diet of Nothing
1992:Pavement-Slanted and Enchanted
1993:Nirvana-In Utero
1994: Built to Spill- There's Nothing Wrong with Love
1995: Radiohead-The Bends
1996: DJ Shadow-Endtroducing...
1997: The Dandy Warhols: Come Down
1998: Beastie Boys: Hello Nasty
1999: Built to Spill: Keep it Like a Secret (yeah I like BTS, a lot)
2000: Modest Mouse: The Moon and Antartica
2001:Radiohead: Amensiac
2002: N.E.R.D.-In Search Of...
2003: Bear Vs Shark: Right Now, You're in the Best of Hands. And If Something Isn't Quite Right, Your Doctor Will Know in a Hurry
2004: Kanye West: The College Dropout
2005: M.I.A. : Arular
2006: TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain
2007: LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
2008: Why?-Alopecia
So. The 90s as whole were hard for me to do, since I didn't really start getting into music until about middle school (late nineties). 1995 was especially hard, sicne I'm not that big on the Bends. 2004 was the hardest year. I had to choose between Ye's debut (still my favorite of his), Interpol's Antics, and Funeral by the Arcade Fire. Damn. And yes, I stand by the Bear Vs Shark decision.
Here are the albums I put in SA's top 10, and why.
10. Chris Joss-Teraphonic Overdubs
On Joss' most recent release, he creates the ultimate cool. A record so cool in fact, that it uses its disc as the club it wants to be played at. If you want a summer record that's a bit more substantial than Girl Talk, this is a good pickup.
9. Steven Malkmus and the Jicks-Real Emotional Trash
Malkmus is this guy, in this band, on Matador, they're indie rock, and they have Janet Weiss from Sleater-Kinney on drums. Yeah, this is reminiscent of a Pavement album, but that's not a bad thing. Steven and his Jicks are a more mature version of his seminal band, but the creative songwriting still remains.
8. Subtle-ExitingARM
If there's a record label I love that most people don't listen to, it's anticon. Their most famous output may very well be cLOUDDEAD, but damn that band is over. Two members of that group make the list, and the first is Doseone. Enter the band Subtle, who are composed of Dose and a band of others who make truly alternative pop songs. Damn catchy and strange.
7.The Cool Kids-The Bake Sale EP
Remember when hip-hop was all about the 808 and some nice rhymes? Mikey and Chuck do, self-producing their beats and telling you just how gangster they aren't. A 10-song EP is ordinarily considered long, but this one felt short. Turn it on and keep it on repeat, for a long time.
6.Jamie Lidell-Jim
Duffy, Adele, Estelle, Winehouse and the like all bore me. They all fill the unnecessary gap of "soul-ifluenced British female singer", with cookie-cutter songs. Duffy, I'll have some mercy on you and myself by just listening to Jamie instead. On his most traditional album to date, Lidell makes perfect pop songs. I've got the irrestibly catchy chorus to "Greenlight" stuck in my head, and then it becomes "A little bit of feel good", and it's great. Pure vocalists need to get familiar with this record.
5.Cut Copy-In Ghost Colours
I was born in the late eighties, and if I wanted to know what the few years before it sounded like, two albums on the list will definitely help me out. One is In Ghost Colours, the second album from Australian group Cut Copy. A great dance album, with pure pop ideas.
4. Fuck Buttons-Street Horrrsing
You can't pronounce this band's full name on air, and chances are you're being challeneged. Melodically noisy, this Englsh duo use everything at their disposal to make long, sweeping epics that have more composition than drone. Live, they're actually really entertaining-because it's LOUD. The debut from Fuck Buttons isn't as scary as it might appear, in fact, it's quite rewarding.
3.M83-Saturdays=Youth
Another album about the 80s. As I said in another thread, this sounds like a John Hughes movie. It also sounds like an M83 album, a fact I find more important. I liked M83 beforehand, as Anthony Gonzalez's mutli-layered keyboard attack was drenching and enjoyable. This disc might sound like Judd Nelson dissecting his family life, but it's a fantastic composition nonetheless.
2.Cadence Weapon-Afterparty Babies
Hip-hop isn't dead, it just moved to Canada. twentysomething rapper Cadence Weapon shines on his breakthrough sophomore album, a mix of clever hooks, pop culture references, and solid songwriting. Solid start to finish, with instrospection and (failed) attempts at the club banger, this album is destined to be a hidden classic.
1. Why?-Alopecia
Damn. No album has quite had a hold on me as this anticon release from former cLOUDDEAD member Yoni Wolf (who was named Why?) and his band. Yoni's lyrics have something new every time, a new meaning to every song. Alopecia has some deep shit, but it's all wrapped up in crafty style-shifting songs. "The Vowels, Pt II" lets you know right at the start how optimistic this album is gonna be : "I'm not a ladies man/ I'm a landmine, filming my own fake death". Scattered among the album are more pessimistically optimistic words of wisdom, such as "I haven't seen you in a long time but yours is a funeral I'd fly to from anywhere". "Billy the kid did what he did and he died", Yoni matter-of-factly states in "Song of the Sad Assassin". Dark lyrics, but sometimes you need darkness to find the light.
Comments
Cadence Weapon, Why?, and Fuck Buttons. I think it was your descriptions that caught my eye
Giving away things for free is awesome, especially when you yourself make your music for free. Such is the case for Pittsburgh's very own Greg Gillis, who's better known to the world as Girl Talk. Gillis is the name when it comes to mash-ups in the modern era. With Feed the Animals, his fourth full-length on Illegal Art, his marketing seems more important.
Resembling more of the method offered by Trent Reznor and the release of the last Saul Williams (and NIN) albums, Illegal Art and GT offered the album for free, five dollars, or ten dollars (or more). Nothing got you 320kbps mp3 files, five bucks got you the FLAC, and ten bucks plus 3 dollars shipping got you the cd. I decided on nothing, because I couldn't afford more of it, and I'm just going to burn this to a CD later anyhow. Girl Talk was a name before this, but deliberately releasing his album in this method definitely gave him more attention. While Gillis is no Thom Yorke, his album has made noise among the music community, at least. That all said, is it good?
The formula is simple: take well-known mainstream rap songs (most that fit easily into the rhythmic hits format I was raised on) set them against pop or indie songs some might not get. Instantly, there's an accessible album for everyone. Instantly, anyone can realize that this is a noveltly disc, not the newest Sigur Ros in terms of high art. Gillis is good at what he does, no doubt.
Feed the Animals starts off with a mix of "Gimme Some Lovin'" and "International Player's Anthem (I Choose You)", gving the idea that yep, you're going to hear interesting stuff like that. What you get is more mix fun, with a few highlights here-and-there. Gillis does just enough to make it work, barely trying to speed up anything or make it glitchtastic. A great example of this is the simple use of having Jonny Greenwood's menacing guitar from "Paranoid Android" serve as the background to Jay's smooth swagger on the first verse "Roc Boys" in the song "Set it Off". While having the two most respected icons of their respective genres go against each other makes sense, the rest of the album is a grab bag. "Tell Me When to Go" against "I Want You to Want Me", alrightm then. Gillis did make one fantastic improvement-urgency of modernity.
We get to learn that he watches TV, as he includes Yael Naim's "New Soul", the song that sounds like Feist but isn't Feist from that MacBook Air commercial, as the background to a verse from Eminem (speaking of, what happened to Marshall Mathers? At this point he's gonna have an album out at the same time as Detox). Where Gillis succeeds in being ultracurrent, though, is with the hip-hop samples. "Love in this Club" and "Lollipop", arguably this year's biggest singles, make appearances. Also showing up to the party are Timbaland, Timberlake and Madonna with "4 Minutes" (thankfully not in the album for that long), and my favorite sample, "Gold and a Pager" by the Cool Kids.
Recognition of the contemporary sound is one thing, but it's only going to last so long. This is the mix you were too lazy or too uninformed to make, the mix you give to your friend who loves music but has never heard of Radiohead or something. For the price, it's right. Is it the end-all, be-all of 2008? Of course not. Is it fun to listen to, as background music? Yeah, sure is.
Condensed: Girl Talk gives away album for free, has more current singles, fun to listen to, good for the summer. RIYL: Steinski. dj/rupture, WNVZ-FM 104.5
Comments
Nice write up, and like you I am going to try and get it for free......just to get a taste
"Tell Me When to Go" against "I Want You to Want Me"
Further proof that this album won't disappoint me. Thanks for a good review.
MOG Meter
Comments
Geez, I was out of high school when you were born. At least you didn't wait until three weeks from now, right after my birthday, when I'll have to be kept from all sharp objects anyway.
I'll get on this, and then you'll see how ancient I am.
Well, my parents had me young. Whatever that means.
jeez, I'm tempted to try this, but I think it would take me a really long time (even though I only have 2 more years than you). I wasn't into music until high school also, so my knowledge of albums pre-2000 is sadly limited.