50. Akron/Family - Akron/Family
Folktronica is a misleading term, but then, so is Laptop-Folk. Isn't all Folk lap-related? It's where the guitar sits as you coo, and that coo, it's lap-related. Admit it brother/sister, you're trying to coo a lover into that lap. Ain't no shame in that. Every listen to Akron/Family's self-titled record is a reminder that I don't listen to it enough. The sense of experimentation in styles is finely pronounced, for all its spontaneity, the songs never lose shape entirely. They always keep me enraptured. Is this postmodern? I don't really know how to define postmodernism, but then isn't that what postmodernism is? All that matters about Akron/Family is that at its heart is an honest and likeable voice. There are bleeps and beeps and strings, too.
49. Phosphorescent - Pride
The sound of Pride played late night/early morning is a transcendental experience. 'The Waves at Night' quite literally laps against the walls of the room you're in, the reverb that carries Matthew Houck's voice washes around and back again. But it's 'Wolves' that offers the closest summary of this record, with Houck singing 'Momma there's Wolves in the house/momma I tried to get them out.' It's a song that can transport you into the freezing foreground of a Jack London short story. The record closes with the title track, a pack of Houcks groaning and hollering in the vast, perfectly rendered expanse of Pride's universe.
48. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
And so you have the most addictive album in recent years, 'Lights and Music' is an instant stamp on the unconscious: 'Lights and music, in my mind/Be my baby, one more time'. Those lyrics read like Whigfield, but that sort of layman-esque euphoria is irrelevant with music as good as In Ghost Colours. There are also a number of very good ambient tracks that could be filler nine times out of ten, 'We Fight for Diamonds', 'Voices in Quartz', 'Visions', they all positively glow. The basslines might be the lasting element, the shuddering synth blurts that appear on the final curve of the bass shatter all my inhibition and light up the present.
47. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
I constantly question how good this album actually is, and the story about Justin Vernon buggering off into a little hut owned by his Dad is really a poor man's Henry David Thoreau - sorry, Justin, but you didn't build your own gaff. But then Vernon didn't do all the talking here, it was mostly British newspapers and magazines who were like 'OMG der is like this new sound with compooterz and like deep folk vocals'. Number 1 record of 2008 it ain't. I think it's fair to say Vernon needs to get some new material out there, and indeed, Blood Bank is very good, and the side-project with Collections of Colonies of Bees, Volcano Choir, proves the man got skill. And so, I do like this record. A lot. But it's more a sign of talents yet to ripen than some kind of God-on-earth solar eclipse. Lump Sum is fucking superb. The early music intro of cathedral-size cooing is exactly what I love about this artist. And then there's a bloody 4/4, 808 kick to take things off! A very good record, but a first draft on something greater and yet to arrive.
46. Feist - The Reminder
This, British popular media, is a pop record, ok? So stop throwing around the term as if it was some sort of reneged evil-doer who actually deserves a second chance because really it's actually kind of an economic resurgent. Feist didn't deserve that, she's so above it, this woman is like my best friend. Have you seen her on Sesame Street? How could there be any sort of social unrest in North America with Sesame Street and Feist appearing in the same room at least once. '1-2-3-4' is Bresson-esque simplicity that outlives its dick-pod advertisement. There are flashes of REM, Neil Young, the Beatles, with songs like 'Past in Present' and 'I Feel it All' ringing like classic folk-rockers. The Reminder has everything going for it.
45. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
I'll admit that listening to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah recently didn't offer the same thrills as once before. But skipping to track 5 - Details of the War - is a heady experience. It reminds me of lying on the floor, stretching out my arms and despairing. That chugging song is temperamental hurt in itself, it feels really sorry for itself. But the toms that patter and climb beneath the scrambling guitars always seem to lift the song back to its feet, however dour that strange voice is. 'It's over/I have seen it all before.' Oh, my. Sometimes it's nice to lie on the floor and sulk.
44. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
I prefer the slow churn of Feels, it's true, but Merriweather Post Pavilion is a great record. It's not exactly the breakthrough that some have called it. The videos for the songs, particularly 'In the Flowers', underline Animal Collective's intention to obscure rather than entertain. I think they should be a applauded for that. This is an intensely economic game they're involved in - hence adverts for MPP's sickening artwork on London's tube network - but they manage to reject it and evoke something above the banal thrum of the capitalist music ditch. Noah Lennox's 'My Girls' is one of the great songs of my lifetime, the hellenistic philosophers would be fucking proud. Every time I listen to that song, life - this mundane, modern thing - takes on an importance that belies its visual appearance. Yes, New Weird America has given me reason to believe. Noah Lennox (aye-kay-aye Panda Bear) is possibly the great auteur of popularish-music today. He even has himself an understudy in Bradford Cox who learns from him, borrows him, and creates in his image.
43. Marissa Nadler - Songs III: Bird on the Water
2007 was a great year for music, ushered in (nearly) by Joanna Newsom in December 2006 with Ys, and solidified in the early months with records from LCD Soundsystem and that debut from Panda Bear. But one record which went *cliche alert* 'largely-unnoticed' is Marissa Nadler's Songs III: Bird on the Water. The first track is a killer, 'Diamond Heart' is a terrifying song about the death of Marissa's lover's father, 'Your father died, some months ago/and we scattered his ashes, in-the-snow'. 'Oh, my lonely diamond heart, that misses you so well/Oh, my lonely diamond heart/that misses you/oh well.' That 'Oh' is a typically romantic start to a sentence, and Nadler's lyrics have something of Petrarch about them, they capture a sense of longing 'so well'.
42. The Microphones - The Glow Pt. 2
This record remains an unknown quanitity of sorts, for me. But listening to the melody that erupts in 'I Want Wind to Blow', the opener to The Glow Pt. 2, is like being endowed with some kind of all-encompassing wisdom. The clanging guitars never leave you, I would love to type how it sounds 'dun dun dun-dun, dun dun dun-dun duhhh', but that's not it. What about the distant field recording of a boat that appears like a leitmotif, 'bwooooooooarh', towards the end of the record, and eventually sees it out. This record is what America sounds like to me, a place I've never been to. I idealise Anacortes, Washington, all a part of Phil Elvrum's oeuvre, probably the very thing that marks him out as a great musician, photographer and drawererer. I remember eavesdropping on my friend Graeme handing a copy of this record to someone about 4 years ago now. 'I assure you, you'll love this,' he said to the recipient of the disc. And since then, I knew that I would too.
41. The National - Boxer
I heartily enjoy Dark was the Night, but the myspace-esque friendship blurting of The National's bros Dressner kind of grates. Out of the context of Boxer, Matt Berninger's voice sounds way off. That drawl and growl just isn't fit for foil alongside Justin Vernon, the textures don't mesh. The portentousness is distracting. But, on Boxer, it's wonderful. Maybe it's the sense of humour Berninger has in singing about 'baking apples, making pies' and lemonade and that. 'Fake Empire' too, it has a sort of personal decay about it that isn't too Sn** Pat*** or U*. Because, let's face it, I find that sort of stadium rock horsecarp sickening. This blurb has indeed been a moan about The National in other spheres, but then who could be proud about appearing in the narrative intro for Hollyoaks. Can you put narrative and Hollyoaks in the same sentence? The fact is that the proliferation of good music into shit consumerist nonsense is saddening and it does have an effect on the original product itself. But what Boxer was to me, pre-H****oaks, means more than the pain of hearing a good song in bad company.
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