Without further delay, the continuation of Racecar Brown's top fifty albums of the decade.
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Craig Finn, the head man behind the Hold Steady, can tell a fucking story. Even when he's guesting on a hip-hop album (P.O.S.'s Audition) there's something about his nasally Midwest drawl that conjures up photographic images to accompany his detailed stories of townies and hoodrats, Charlemagne and Chicago. His dense wordplay spins around the band's cheap-beer guitar heroics to create dioramas of Twin Cities suburbs that made anyone feel like they had been there.
Separation Sunday was when the Hold Steady really shook themselves of the specter of Craig Finn's old band Lifter Puller, something their debut album could only attempt to do. The massive bar-band hooks of tracks like "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" and "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" proved doubtless that the Hold Steady were a separate, arguably superior, entity. Even if Craig Finn would always provide an imitable link, the drunken rock licks of the Hold Steady stood a cut above.
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It's hard to get used to the idea of Modest Mouse as a pop band. Despite the fact that they've had only a couple singles of any note on the Billboard charts, make no mistake, Modest Mouse is now a pop band. They'll never be the same crushingly angsty, engagingly depressing band that created The Lonesome Crowded West or This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About and, despite the difficulty of the thought, it's truthfully a good thing.
"Float On" and Good News For People Who Love Bad News were Modest Mouse as a pop band in gestation, but their 2007 album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank saw their pop-rock dreams realized with the addition of former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. Where Good News' lyrics and music seemed tentative and half-formed, We Were Dead, with tracks like the "Parting of the Sensory" and "Spitting Venom", sounded self-assured, like the band were ready to be a great pop band, even if the fans weren't.
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There was a time when Behind the Music was the best show on VH1. Before it became essentially a parody of itself, it was an intriguing and sometimes startling look at the stories behind some of the most popular bands and artists of their time. Audiences like knowing of the motivations behind artists and behind music; connecting with the music is easier when you know the context in which it was written.
That's what makes The Stage Names such an engaging listen. There are songs that sound self-referential, like the emotional groupie tale "A Girl In Port", and others are packed with pop culture references, like "Plus Ones", a song bitter at music's lack of originality, or the subversively gentle "Savannah Smiles" with it's implicated porn star tale. They all seemed to give a unique, peep-hole look into worlds that listeners could only dream at, like Behind the Music as music, and for pop culture. Like voyeurs, we couldn't help but listen.
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There are two ways to make an album cohesive. The first is obvious: The band crafts an identifiable sound and sticks to it, using the "rules" of the sound they have created, but pushing and pulling at the boundaries of those rules to make an engaging listen. The second is counterintuitive: The band jumps around from sound to sound so much that the variety itself is cohesive. Beck's Odelay is cohesive precisely because of how little regard it has for keeping to one sound. The same is true of Broken Social Scene's second album You Forgot It in People.
No two songs back to back sound the same on the record, even if there are ties between tracks, like the frenetic energy shared by "KC Accidental", "Almost Crimes", and "Cause = Time", or the gentile beauty in "Stars and Sons", "Anthems For a Seventeen-Year Old Girl", and "Lover's Spit". The band seems to lack any sort of fear in crafting such different but wholly affecting anthems, and in that fearlessness they pull it off, an album cohesive for its differences.
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Music is math. Boards of Canada said it, it's true. More so than the math inherent in things such as time signatures and chordal harmonies, music is math in a subtle way. So many bands that attempt to do something unique with their music (I'm looking at you, post-rock) try to do so by addition. They layer and layer in attempt to create more interest, but without the right touch this approach can end up sounding busy and incoherent.
Menomena's Friend And Foe may not have been attempting to be a counterexample to that trend, but it's an album that succeeds because of subtraction. Instruments that crop up never outstay their welcome, and the band is perfectly willing to allow the absolute minimum instrumentation to make their emotional point, like the head voice and keyboard drone intro to "Wet and Rusting" or the sleigh bell and piano opening verse to "Boyskouts Sweetboyskouts". Friend and Foe was a reminder that sometimes it's subtraction more than addition that gives you the greatest number.
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On election night in 2008 on CNN, the news outlet had cameras stationed in Kenya, the country where Barack Obama's father was born in, as well in Chicago's Grant Park, where hundreds of thousands had gathered in hopes of hearing an Obama victory speech. As the Illinois Senator's victory become more and more imminent the excitement began to increase and, when the 44th President was finally confirmed, the CNN cameras cut between both camps, both celebrating with abandon, jumping up and down and yelling for joy.
If there's anything Warm Heart of Africa most resembles, it's that moment. The way people from Africa and the West can feel undeniably together in a single moment, whether that moment is an important global first or simply a communal tribal stomp with M.I.A. The album represented the connection between those two peoples and those two moments even though (because?) it wasn't attempting to make that connection. It was simply there, an optimistic piece of music for people just beginning to feel optimistic again on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Death Cab For Cutie have an easily identifiable sound that is somewhere between indie-pop and commercial emo, and sometimes it takes a few too many steps in one direction or the other. The balancing act between the two sides is difficult, but it's also important to Death Cab's music, it's at the fulcrum of the two opposing sides that the group makes their most affecting music. When they delve too far one way or the other, it shows, sometimes embarrassingly so.
The Photo Album was the last Death Cab album that maintained that precarious balance over the course of its entire length. Cleaner and sharper than either of the band's first two records, it still held that genuine quality of those records, the quality that kept their romantic allegories from becoming cringe-worthy, and even thrived in darker territories, like the dark bridge of "We Laugh Indoors" or the slow-burning "Styrofoam Plates". While The Photo Album held no surprises, it tread expertly on the line between drama and melodrama, becoming even more emotional for it.
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Music this complex isn't supposed to be able to make you bang your head. But Battles were never really concerned about playing to preconceptions. Look at the EPs that preceded their full-length. They were filled with ambient experiments, tape loop manipulations, straight-forward (well, straight-forward for Battles) rock and a ten-part song suite of which the last nine were made up of a single drum machine kick.
The meandering quality of their EPs disappeared on Mirrored, and instead the math-rock supergroup went for straight muscle, attacking listeners right from the onset with the figure eight guitars and ratatat snares of "Race In", followed by the bombardment of toms and chipmunk vocals on "Atlas", and then the jittery Ritalin sunshine of "Ddiamondd". And Mirrored didn't let up from there, weaving their intricate melodic work around their rock steady rhythm section, creating music that should have been too complex to rock out to, but was instead to rockin' to feel complex.
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There's evidence that Phil Elvrum might be crazy. His follow up album to The Glow, Pt. 2 was a massive five-song concept album with Calvin Johnson playing the Universe. Yes, the entire Universe. It melted Elvrum's brain so much that he couldn't continue with the Microphones moniker and changed his one-man band's name to Mount Eerie, same as the name of that album, and kind of disappeared into the ether, kind of forgotten even though he's released more than a couple albums under the new name.
Maybe it's because even Elvrum's "black metal" album Wind's Poem couldn't match the epic massiveness that he achieved with The Glow, Pt. 2, an album that covers a gamut of emotions over the course of its twenty tracks, from hopelessness on "The Mansion" to romanticism on "I Felt Your Shape" to acceptance on "I'll Not Contain You". Elvrum's poetic, child-like curiosity to everything he encounters, even the wind and his own blood, on The Glow, Pt. 2 may be further indicator of his pseudo-insanity, but it was also what made the record such a triumph. He didn't need to hide behind those massive concepts to communicate his resigned possible mental illness.
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Maybe Outkast should break up. It's clear that the pair are getting along fine without each other. Their separate albums on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below both unleashed killer singles on the listening public; "Hey Ya" may be the one that's ubiquitous, but "The Way You Move" was also a monster. Andre 3000 seems content to pop up in various movies and Big Boi doesn't seem to miss him as a foil when Gucci Mane worked just as well on "Shine Blockas".
And, let's be honest, matching Stankonia is just not going to happen. It shouldn't be surprising that the album that came to us live from the center of the earth doesn't have an equal, even for a group as talented as Outkast. Opener "Gasoline Dreams" was as volatile as its name, and Andre 3000 spat the questions in the chorus as if you had personally insulted him, and it wasn't even one of the top three songs on the album, not on an album with "B.O.B.", "Ms. Jackson" and "So Fresh and So Clean". While it's precisely those songs that make us lament the apparent tensions in the group, maybe the pair should scrap their plans for a 2010 album and the legacy they built on Stankonia's back alone.
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