Top Albums of The Decade #5
Low – Things We Lost In The Fire (2001)
The band’s called Low. The album’s called Things We Lost In The Fire. Their music is christened ‘slowcore’ by the music press. If what you have in mind is dark, cold and depressing, you’re just about half right. The pairing of Mimi Parker’s minimal, sparse drumming and Alan Sparhawk’s restrained guitar gives every song an ominous, eerie quality. While it’s all that and more, it’s also achingly beautiful and thoroughly captivating, especially when husband and wife team up on vocals on tracks like ‘Medicine Magazines’ and ‘Sunflower’. Things We Lost In The Fire can easily bring you to tears if you let it.
Listen to ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Medicine Magazines’
Top Albums of The Decade #4
Aaliyah – Aaliyah (2001)
While her mid-90′s pretty-girl R&B compatriots like Brandy and Monica fizzled out by the beginning of the decade, Aaliyah went from strength to strength until her untimely demise in 2001 at the age of 22. A large part of her success came from her symbiotic relationship with Timbaland and Missy Elliott. Symbiotic, because Aaliyah wouldn’t have had the impact she had on music without Timbaland’s then futuristic percussive stutters and self-sampling studio trickery, and Timbaland wouldn’t have had the platform to showcase his work without Aaliyah’s wide-reaching commercial appeal.
Aaliyah is a thoroughly enjoyable pop and dance record. She may not hit the annoyingly high registers of Beyonce or jerk her ass so hard it makes your TV fall off the table but she makes up for it by infusing a great deal of intimacy and closeness into her vocals. Aaliyah always sounds like she’s singing for herself first, then for you. And only you. Aaliyah, you’re sorely missed.
Top Albums of The Decade #3
Amon Tobin – Supermodified (2000)
Supermodified is an album that is simultaneously atmospheric and downright sinister. One moment you’re flying over green landscapes (‘Slowly’), the next moment you’re being chased down a dark, dank alley (‘Golfer vs Boxer’). And when you’ve survived that you’re back to flying over green landscapes (the aptly titled ‘Natureland’). Amon Tobin mostly incorporates samples from jazz and film soundtracks but what defines each track is his frenetic drum programming. He can either take it slow and easy or kick you in the eardrums at a cacophonous 170 beats per minute. All this and more while you wade through a dense sludge of plaintive guitars, industrial metal clangs and lounge pianos.
Top Albums of The Decade #2
Daft Punk – Discovery (2001)
The first four tracks of Discovery alone are worth the price of admission – ‘One More Time’ sets the stage, heavily auto-tuned and robotized for a generation of post-millennium disco freaks, with the energy level topping out on ‘Digital Love’ which is my personal pick for possibly the best single of the decade. Things sort of simmer down in the second half, bookmarked by the soft-porn instrumental piece ‘Nightvision’ and doesn’t quite peak again, not even in Daft Punk’s subsequent releases. Still, is this not the happiest record ever released regardless of whatever decade? From the get go Discovery is all about intense euphoria, unbridled joy and partying like we shouldn’t have made it past 1999 but are ecstatically grateful that we did.
Top Albums of The Decade #1
I’ve been working on this list for about two weeks now, and about a week before that deciding which records I should include in the first place. I’ve got about forty albums in an Excel sheet but am finding it a daunting task having to write about them all. So instead of trying to come up with one mega-post I’ve decided to split the list into bite-size chunks by posting a mini-essay on one album at a time. It’s going to be in random arbitrary order but hopefully that would impel me to continue writing instead of looking at the list in discouragement and going, “Aarggh is anyone even going to read this?!”
More than half of the list is made up of albums released in just the first two years of the past decade. Maybe those two years were really that great. Maybe it’s just a case of the albums having had more time than the rest to really sink in. Or perhaps it’s a combination of all that and being a guy in his early twenties discovering a ton of new music for the first time.
So anyway here’s the first one.
Shoutout to Core News
I thought I should let you all in on this site that’s basically been my number one music resource this past year. You won’t find pre-release albums or anything of that sort on Core News. However you do get a dedicated guy uploading BBC radio shows on a regular basis and in exceptional satellite-radio quality to boot. You can of course stream past shows from the BBC website itself but they’re always only available for a week from the original broadcast date. And we all know streaming audio sucks ass. The three important ones for me are the Benji B, Mary Anne Hobbs and Gilles Peterson shows.
Start with these:
Benji B 2009 12 13 End of Year Special Part 2 – Best of 2009
Mary Anne Hobbs Experimental 2009 12 24 Highlights of 2009
Gilles Peterson Worldwide 2009 12 16 Worldwide Winners special – best tracks of 2009
Flying Lotus – Weezy
I’m not sure why producers love remixing Lil’ Wayne. He’s a good entertainer no doubt, but I’ll be damned if he’s a good rapper. Having said that, Flying Lotus’ remixes for ‘A Milli’ and ‘I Feel Like Dying’ somehow does feel a bit off the mark without Weezy on them.
Both tracks, vocal versions and instrumentals, are downloadable from the Brainfeeder website, made available by Flylo himself.
Top 20 Records of 2009
Continuing on from what started last year, 2009 has mostly been about beats and electronic music. I have to honestly say I have completely lost touch with new indie bands. Put it this way – I am more interested in new artists I read about on XLR8R than on Pitchfork nowadays. I did enjoy Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and bought the new A Sunny Day In Glasgow. I was also tempted to include Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion but aside from the hallucination-inducing album cover I can’t remember anything from it really. The one band I had on constant repeat this year was for some reason R.E.M. Peter Buck noted that Automatic For The People dealt with themes of loss and mourning inspired by “that sense of turning thirty”. Maybe that’s why?
Anyway, here for your reading pleasure are the top twenty records that I’ve heard this year in alphabetical order.