College Times

Issue date: 1/10/08 Section: Music

Media Credit: Mike Schreiber

1. M.I.A.

Kala

(Interscope)

The music on M.I.A.’s second album, Kala, pulses with a sound that’s hard to define clearly. It’s a new World Music, the sound of a woman existing among many cultures. It’s as much Western dance music, with the beats and sounds of hip-hop and house music, as it is a blending of Third World musical sounds, from percussion to singing. It is also the most original sound produced this year.

These songs are about a revolution, one that places as much importance on geopolitical situations and economics, as it does gender and race. As she states in “20 Dollar,” “I put people on the map that never seen a map.” Even more important, she brings these people together, whether citizens of African nations, Asian nations, European nations or North American nations. M.I.A. knows that those without voices are remarkably similar no matter where they are: all are being kept prisoners of a world run by a small elite, a world defined too often by poverty, one where the choices are so limited that merely dancing is often the best, and only worthwhile, choice available.

For those of us not used to Indian music or African music, M.I.A. delivers this message by quoting some great modern Western musical revolutionaries: The Modern Lovers, The Clash and The Pixies all provide samples. It’s a form of reclamation, a woman taking the songs of revolution, whether artistic or political, from a culture that dominates mass media, and joining them with the sounds of cultures often left out of mass media. It’s no coincidence that Kala is the most powerful album released this year; both the woman and her music are hard to ignore, and that’s the best way to make a statement, whether political or not.

 

2. IRON & WINE

The Shepherd’s Dog

(Sub Pop)

The Shepherd’s Dog is as close to perfect as an album can get. Its music is deftly played and beautifully recorded; the arrangements are inventive and surprising, while never overwhelming Sam Beam’s wonderful songs; and that music perfectly serves Beam’s lyrics and voice, that of a Southern story teller weaving whispered tales of individuals struggling to make sense of a confusing and frightening world. The music is a mixture of styles, incorporating rock, soul, country and folk into a dense psychedelic landscape. It’s the aural equivalent to Beam’s words, many of which tackle love and community in elliptical ways, helping to push the point that human experience is a complicated one, an existence that is never black and white, never exactly as it seems. With collaborators that include members of Calexico, producer Brian Deck, and Beam’s sister, Sarah, whose voice so wonderfully compliments her brother’s, Sam Beam has pushed his music beyond the simple four-track recordings he started out producing. That these songs are as timeless as his earlier, mostly acoustic songs only illustrates how timeless the music of Iron & Wine is; it is this timelessness that makes Sam Beam one of the great American songwriters working today.

 

3. JENS LEKMAN

Night Falls Over Kortedala

(Secretly Canadian)

Norway’s Jens Lekman is a romantic. On his second full-length release, he has crafted a pop album that perfectly encompasses the belief that music is the art form that best touches the heart. Night Falls Over Kortedala is 12 tracks of music about nothing more than love, whether it’s brotherly love in “The Opposite of Hallelujah,” the love between friends in “Shirin,” or the romantic love that colors practically every other song on the album. Within the detailed lyrics are explorations of the sadness, confusion, joy and nostalgia that love forces upon people. The music helps push the romantic notions here, with the lush production and nods to doo-wop, soul, show tunes, disco and British pop. But it’s Lekman, with his slight accent and resonant voice that really completes the sense of innocence and wonder that comes with these kind of emotions. Like Morrissey, Stephen Merritt and Jonathan Richman before him, Lekman’s vision requires a certain lack of pretension on the part of listeners: give in to his beautiful music, forget how silly it all can seem, and you’ll find it’s easily one of the best albums released this year, an album guaranteed to make you smile.

 

4. AESOP ROCK

None Shall Pass

(Definitive Jux)

Jeremy Fish’s artwork inside the booklet for None Shall Pass is an apt analogy for Aesop Rock’s newest, and best, album: there, in line, are a series of illustrated characters dressed up as familiar animals, most smoking, some drinking and a couple holding weapons or looking beat up. It’s an image that is cute because of its cartoon nature, but also disarming for the viciousness just underneath the surface. This is the way Aesop Rock’s album sounds: it is a series of songs whose music is defined by funky bass tones and deep beats born out of classic house and hip-hop songs; but Aesop takes those beats, the most inviting of his career, and layers multiple images and metaphors over them. It’s easy to be lulled into passive listening, but at that moment the rapid fire lyrics take over, forcing a series of confusing ideas into the same space left disarmed by the music. And once it happens, it is hard to stop. The need to understand Aesop takes over, despite being a futile exercise. For this reason, Aesop Rock remains the best, and most underrated, hip-hop artist working today, an artist that understands that hip-hop is best when it challenges and entertains listeners.

 

5. LES SAVY FAV

Let’s Stay Friends

(French Kiss)

Let’s Stay Friends opens with a statement of purpose from Les Savy Fav: “Has your skin grown thick from bands that make you sick? … Have you been made dense from polish and pretense? Well, this is where it stops. This is where it ends. Let’s tear this whole place down and build it up again. This band’s a beating heart and it’s nowhere near its end.” From there, the band launches into their best album yet, an album that perfectly articulates restlessness and rage. Les Savy Fav took a long hiatus between studio albums, and in that time they’ve seen the ragged post-punk they helped to popularize in New York City become yet another faceless style of “alternative” music populated by pretty boys in eyeliner with nothing to say. Les Savy Fav stripped away the clarity and pop sheen from punk songs with dance beats, exposing the rawness that is a necessary component of rock music. Leave it to a group of guys over 30 to bring the edge back to punk rock. Then again, no one knows what a bad deal real life is until they’ve grown up and joined the real world. This is the angry response to real life.

 

6. THE NATIONAL

Boxer

(Beggars Banquet)

With Boxer, The National continues to perfect a sound that meets singer Matt Berninger’s tales of urban ennui head on. As Berninger’s characters merely exist together in apartments and bars, searching for some futile meaning, the band plays music that is isolated and disconnected: the drums pound, the guitars echo, the bass pulses and lush strings accent the most beautiful moments. In the end, despite the sadness that real life brings, there’s still the hopefulness of a night spent drinking, and a night spent in each others’ arms. It’s that hope that makes The National’s music so rewarding.

 

7. JAY-Z

American Gangster

(Def Jam)

American Gangster is Jay-Z’s real comeback album. It’s a dense work, a legend taking on the American myth. Mixing his own reality with that of Frank Lucas, Jay-Z takes on that myth directly, exposing what it means to come up from nothing, and what it takes to keep that success. Meanwhile, he takes on his critics, the critics of hip-hop and those people that deem themselves protectors of America’s values. With music that references soul classics and club beats, American Gangster is precisely the kind of grand statement that only an artist as large as Jay-Z could make.

 

8. GRINDERMAN

Grinderman

(Anti)

Grinderman is Nick Cave’s attempt to exorcise the demons of masculinity and misogyny. It’s a suitably raw album, an album of pure rock and roll done Cave’s way. It’s dark and disturbing, but also funny and sarcastic. Playing guitar for the first time, Cave’s written and recorded songs that are simple and rhythmically driven, a sound that further drives home the characterization of men in songs like “Get It On,” “No Pussy Blues” and “Go Tell the Women.” Like Cave’s prior work dealing with religion, Grinderman is as ugly and disarming as it is fun and exciting.

 

9. SHARON JONES AND THE DAP-KINGS

100 Days, 100 Nights

(Daptone)

With a voice that is strong, sexy and imbued with an incredible emotional depth, Sharon Jones can easily be considered the best singer working today. With The Dap-Kings at her side, they have created three albums of the best soul music available, soul music whose only true equals were made for the Stax and Atlantic labels in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the work released on those labels, the songs on 100 Days, 100 Nights strips the music to its purest form, an analog sound that feels timeless and worn, and makes Jones’ dominating performance even stronger.

 

10. DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN

Ire Works

(Relapse)

On their third full-length release, Dillinger Escape Plan continues to push the boundaries that define extreme music. They still work with the mathematically derived time signatures and chord changes, the blasts of pure metal chaos and the raging anger that defined their early work, all to perfection once again. But it’s the moments that exist in stark contrast to these sounds that makes Ire Works so powerful: the electronic soundscapes, the slowed down grooves, the jazz-like interludes and the melodic vocals help to make these songs three dimensional, and drive home the intensity better than blast beats and screams could.

 

11. MIRANDA LAMBERT

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

(Sony BMG)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a country girl’s feminist statement. It’s an album of Texas rebel music that takes what Steve Earle, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings had done before and gives it a woman’s twist. While Lambert’s attitude has a lot to do with the album’s power, it’s her understanding of small town life, and what women in those communities deal with, that makes these songs so touching, at least when she’s not threatening violence.

 

12. BLACK LIPS

Good Bad Not Evil

(Vice)

Atlanta’s Black Lips made a name for themselves with a live show that defines chaos, and albums steeped in distortion. With Good Bad Not Evil, they finally strip away the layers of distortion to show that they actually do create incredible music. Granted, it’s music performed with a prankster’s grin, full of humorous asides, and the kind of sloppy playing that acknowledges that it is not to be taken too seriously.

 

13. KANYE WEST

Graduation

(Roc-A-Fella)

With Graduation, Kanye West again brings his audacious personality to the front: it takes a bold character to call himself the “fly Malcolm X.” But here, he’s stripped back the lush orchestration of his last album, instead crafting an album of club tracks, with songs that sample Daft Punk and Can, tapping into an inner hipster that only serves to deepen his catalog, as well as complicate his already complex persona.

 

14. THE SHINS

Wincing the Night Away

(Sub Pop)

It now seems impossible for The Shins to make music that doesn’t amaze. Wincing the Night Away is another set of shimmering pieces of lightly psychedelic pop, music that is compelling and catchy, bolstered by lyrics that are knotty and impressionistic. This is easily the band’s best work yet, one that references their previous work, while bringing in new textures and sounds to complicate matters just a little bit more.

 

15. RADIOHEAD

In Rainbows

(Self-Released)

In Rainbows, understandably, made most of its press because of its method of distribution: Radiohead allowed listeners to download it for whatever price they felt willing to pay. Yet, more important than its radical method of distribution, this was the best Radiohead album in years, a work that found the band sounding comfortable and loose, playing music that, while still icy and radical, was more inviting and fun than their last album.

 

16. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

Sound of Silver

(DFA/Capitol)

What sets LCD Soundsystem’s particular brand of ultra-hip dance music apart from most others is the emotion James Murphy injects into his songs. Sure, the snide “North American Scum” stands out quickly, but it’s songs like “Someone Great” and “All My Friends,” with their sense of sadness and longing, that have a lasting effect. At these moments, Murphy taps into the uneasiness that exists even among the coolest people, and makes LCD Soundsystem’s music universal.

 

17. BAND OF HORSES

Cease to Begin

(Sub Pop)

Band of Horses’ debut album was a good album by a band that owed too big a debt to their influences. But on Cease to Begin, the band moves past simple My Morning Jacket and Neil Young name dropping. This is their first true artistic statement, one that harnesses the band’s love of epic shoegazer post-punk and country music, without sounding derivative. It also contains the best album-opener of the year in “Is There a Ghost.”

 

18. OF MONTREAL

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

(Polyvinyl)

On the surface, Of Montreal’s latest album is another blast of twisted pop music, music that is a sort of crazy electronic bedroom glam pop from outer space. It seems even more so with the band’s increasingly eclectic live show. But this is an album born from the near failure of a family and a man’s mental breakdown, and its harrowing lyrics make no effort to disguise the chaos and sadness that comes with that reality.

 

19. BATTLES

Mirrored

(Warp)

Battles’ Mirrored redefines what progressive rock can be, taking elements of that much maligned genre, and splicing them into the textures normally associated with electronic music. In doing so, the band creates an album that sounds like nothing before it, making music that is equal parts giddy pop, heavy riff-driven rock, long-form jam sessions and mechanical machine music. It is easily one of the most impressive debut albums of the year.

 

20. SPOON

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

(Merge)

Spoon continues to impress with albums that twist a formula so familiar at this point. The songs on their latest album sound like “Spoon” songs, with their Motown references and New Wave pop riffs, but as they have with every album prior, it’s the presentation that has evolved. Here, they play with layers of instrumentation, constructing and deconstructing songs at will, making the studio a near equal instrument on another batch of incredible songs.

 

21. DAFT PUNK

Alive 2007

(Virgin)

With Alive 2007, Daft Punk creates the greatest live dance album ever, by remixing and re-imagining music from all three of their studio albums into one seamless party mix.

 

22. El-P

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

(Definitive Jux)

El-P’s second solo album is a sprawling hip-hop epic. It’s a masterpiece of paranoia and chaos, one that proves he is one of the best producers working today.

       

23. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Magic

(Columbia)

Springsteen continues to work through America’s issues in the post-9/11 world with an album that doesn’t attempt to mask the sadness created by war and political extremism.

 

24. DEERHUNTER

Cryptograms

(Kranky)

Cryptograms’ uncomfortable mix of ambient and rhythmic post-punk styles, coupled with lyrics dominated by confusing images, makes it one of the most disorienting, but rewarding, releases of the year.

 

25. ARCADE FIRE

Neon Bible

(Merge)

With Neon Bible, Arcade Fire continues to perfect music that acts as a collective cathartic experience, by turning from the personal to the communal experience of confusion and anger.

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