Month: February 2016

154. Silverchair, Young Modern (2007)

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If you’re reading this amusedly, waiting with bated breath to hear how I will defend selecting an album by Silverchair, the Australian grunge-rock also-rans who released Frogstomp in 1995 and enjoyed a brief moment in the sun on the basis of their largely terrible, Stone Temple Pilots-aping alt-nonsense, well, kick back. I fear that you may not have heard how Silverchair progressed following the release of their most culturally significant record; don’t worry, though, we’re gonna explore that.

You see, as little as I care about Silverchair’s debut record, it makes perfect sense: the band members were quite literally teenagers at the time, so when critics dismissed grunge as music for angsty teens, Silverchair doubled down by making music for angsty teens by angsty teens. They were gifted, but they made garbage music, but that was okay because that’s what teens listened to. It wasn’t for the adults. It’s like when Justin Bieber emerged: he was a kid who made stupid music, but I didn’t need to worry about it because I was an adult. The difference, of course, is that Bieber continued to do things that left me cold — perhaps slightly angry, actually, due to his unearned, douche-y smugness and his intensely punchable face — where Silverchair, over the course of four post-Frogstomp records, matured, eventually evolving into a highly melodic, conceptual, Beatles-indebted band.

It’s been slower road for the Daniel Johns-led trio, of course. The public got a taste of the band’s maturity with 1999’s Neon Ballroom, which got at least one social issue-addressing single on TRL (“Ana’s Song”); fewer people heard 2002’s Diorama, which found Silverchair tackling their most ambitious transformation yet, the angst almost completely stripped away for a wonderful platter of intricate, ornate pop-rock. Five years later, we received an as-of-this-writing final parting shot from the band in the form of Young Modern, and it still holds up.

Perhaps it still holds up because of its classicist bent; music, like Frogstomp, that remains indebted to trends inevitably ages, while music that refuses to root itself in any particular era sounds fresh. That’s kind of reductive and over-simplified, of course, but Young Modern feels indebted to many a classic pop forbear — shades of the Beach Boys, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and the ever-present Beatles abound — without resorting to slavish homage. In essence, they are Silverchair, at least this particular incarnation of Silverchair (a.k.a. “the good Silverchair”). Right up front is Daniel Johns, his voice once ragged from one Weiland/Vedder/Staley impression too many, now a flexible and versatile vocalist, capable of a creamy, cascading falsetto and a full-bore rock tenor, often in the span of a single song (see arena-ready lead single “Straight Lines”). The band, now more sonically varied than ever, sound crisp and in step, and they’ve brought legendary string arranger Van Dyke Parks along for the ride to lend an exciting texture to the already-strong song set.

Parks leaves his stamp all over the record, albeit most notably on the consistently shape-shifting three-part suite “Those Thieving Birds”. Even without the rapturous sense of dynamics lent by Parks’ strings, Silverchair succeed at sounding fresh, melodically inventive, full of wonder — the record’s most traditional-sounding rocker, opener “Young Modern Station”, rushes along with the urgency of Costello or Bloc Party, augmented by Johns’ Buckley-esque falsetto. Later on, “Waiting All Day” sounds like a glammed-out Zombies tribute, that glossy chorus ping-ponging off a gleefully jaunty saloon piano and soaring slide guitar, while the four-on-the-floor hook to “Insomnia” reads like an updated Nuggets selection, garage-rock cleaned up and shiny.

It’s a record with more than a few surprises up its sleeve, although, at the end of the day, its finest moment appears to be its most traditionalist. “Straight Lines” achieves a certain late-night grandeur with its burbling synth opening and open-ended piano line, but hits its stride with Johns’ high-flying, throaty chorus, a big, passionate enough melody to make Silverchair sound like the big-time rock stars they were destined to be. It’s glorious, but the endlessly entertaining Young Modern has something for your other moods too, be you a fan of Joe Jackson or The Format or Jellyfish. It may go down as Silverchair’s unheralded parting shot, but an album as interesting, textured, and ornate as this one doesn’t deserve its lack of reputation.

Playlist track: “Straight Lines”

155. Robyn, Robyn (2005)

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The case of Robyn Carlsson is certainly a curious one, especially for people of my particular age bracket (30, for the record, but I imagine the range can span a year or two either way). The internet tells me that Robyn’s debut record, Robyn Is Here, was released in 1995, so either I’m retroactively hallucinating enjoying her brief moment in the American pop spotlight as a teenager or I’m willing to tell myself as I age that it wasn’t that long ago; whatever the case, the two singles spawned from that record (“Show Me Love” and “Do You Know (What It Takes)”) caught brief fire in the music-video age before Robyn’s star fizzled, taking Robyn back to her native Sweden and away from the collective stateside consciousness.

And that was it for Robyn, at least as far as we ‘Muricans are concerned — her record would gather dust and eventually populate clearance bins the nation over, keeping company with Cathy Dennis and Tal Bachman for all eternity. We’d hear “Show Me Love” in the grocery store or on the radio during a throwback hour, and remember it with vague fondness, and think back to 1996 and go “aw, man, I remember this playing at the school dance!” or “man, Clueless really was a cultural phenomenon and we had no idea,” and that would be it. In Sweden, Robyn was still plying her pop-spiced-with-a-hint-of-r&b brand, and we had no idea and never really cared. She was the very definition of a forgotten artist — not a one hit wonder, per se (and not only because, mathematically, she was at least a two hit wonder), but an artist that briefly existed as commercially viable and then left, just because we moved on.

The distinction’s important. There are usually two reasons why artists disappear from relevance: either their product is so niche and novelty that it’s impossible to exist outside of it (Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, Los Del Rio’s “Macarena”, Lou Bega’s “Mambo #5”, ad infinitum), or they were so perfect once that the public collectively ignored any subsequent efforts to recapture it (Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”, New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give”, Michael Penn’s “No Myth” — not coincidentally, these are the artists that either cultivate devoted underground followings or go on to lucrative touring careers). Robyn kind of exists outside of these two concepts. Her two ’90s hits weren’t particularly novel, existing at a time when vaguely r&b-influenced pop was particularly en vogue, nor were they so good that she simply couldn’t live up to them. They’re a pair of fine, kind of dated pop songs, and that’s pretty much it.

And then, one day, Robyn came back.

She didn’t emerge into the national consciousness or anything. Rather, her 2005 effort Robyn saw success in her native country, crept across Europe, and then, through the magic of the internet and a then-flourishing level of online music journalism, into the States. This was the new Robyn Carlsson, a thing that we never even knew we wanted until it happened. She was a little less cookie-cutter than the last time she stopped by, although each song on the record is a coulda-been hit in a more just world; she was fresh and updated for the aughts with a busy bed of electro-dance that sounded kinda-new and kinda-retro in the same breath, particularly existing as it did in a pre-Ke$ha/Lady Gaga world. It was Annie (remember when people went nuts over Anniemal?) with more soul; it was Madonna with shinier, cooler production. It was fantastic, is what I’m trying to say, and if it doesn’t sound as novel now as it did at the time, it still delivers the goods because Robyn’s pop smarts on her self-titled record were sharper than ever.

On paper, it’s an album of shiny, candy-coated dance-pop. “Konichiwa Bitches” predates Ke$ha’s rapping pop-princess by a few years, upping the ante from Gwen Stefani’s recent weird solo shot; it’s clunky, but endearingly so, and the Sega Genesis juiced up with snare and handclaps beat even more so. (The delivery of the final punchline is actually kind of hilarious, even still.) “Cobrastyle” ups the ante with big fuzzy bass and beat changes, but Robyn weaves so gracefully through styles that she flexes her melodic gifts on the insidiously catchy “Handle Me” and “Bum Like You”.

What makes this album of shiny, candy-coated dance-pop so beguiling, however, is the beating heart at its core. It’s tempting to call this kind of music soulless, and that’s had some merit in the past, but there’s a singular power in some of these tracks that’s missed in a lot of modern pop music. The much-vaunted single, “Be Mine!”, is both deeply catchy and genuinely heartbreaking, a torch song masquerading as a top-40 single, a legitimate candidate for the top ten songs of the decade. Poignant, too, is Robyn’s Kleerup collaboration “With Every Heartbeat”, included on stateside reissues of the record; the additional track only fortifies the album, providing it with a large, monolithic slab of musically-arresting, atmospheric, heartbreak-pop. It’s a terrific track from start to finish, but it approaches something like transcendence when the beat drops out, leaving a soaring string interlude to take us into the coda, wherein the one-line chorus (“and – it- hurts – with – every – heart – beat”) is doubled, then harmonized, then harmonized again over burbling, churning synths.

And, sure, Robyn sometimes affects us with a simple piano ballad like the lovely “Eclipse”, but more often than not, she does it within the framework of her nominally-escapist genre of choice; sometimes the songs are full-on, heart-on-sleeve barnburners like “Be Mine!” and “With Every Heartbeat”, but sometimes she just finds the poignancy in the little moments like that surprise minor chord at the end of the core progression in the kiss-off “Handle Me”, or in the way multi-tracked Robyns rejoin the beat with that three-parter on the “x-ray shine” lyric in the affably goofy futuristic love song “Robotboy”. And that’s what makes Robyn such a perfect pop record: it’s not how good the beats are, or how shiny the melodies, but that beautiful blood-red heart that beats at its core.

(Post-script: Some versions of Robyn, including the one found on Spotify, include a “new version” of a track called “Dream On”. It’s fine, and very sharp lyrically, but it doesn’t compare to the original by the late Christian Falk, which featured not only Robyn but a prominent vocal contribution by Ark frontman Ola Salo and can be found here, you’re welcome very much.)

Playlist track: “Be Mine!”

156. Hercules and Love Affair, Hercules and Love Affair (2008)

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Electronic music isn’t necessarily my forte. It’s not that I inherently dislike it — even taking out of the equation that I couldn’t possibly inherently dislike electronic music because so many genres and styles are folded into that vast umbrella of a category — it’s that dance music that I truly love inspires me not to analyze it intellectually or dissect it musically, it simply makes me feel good. The 2008 debut of Andy Butler-curated nu-disco collective Hercules and Love Affair functions similarly: I can try to delineate the reasons why I feel as though Hercules and Love Affair is one of the best albums of its decade (and on a larger scale, one of my favorite dance albums period), but its insidious energy is pouring through my Bose speakers right now, and it’s filling the room and I kind of want to start a dance party.

Of course, that’s not to say that Butler and company (“company”, in this case, includes a wonderfully Boy George-channeling Antony Hegarty and bassist Tyler Pope of !!!, which should clue you in to this thing’s extra-cool pedigree) are in some way simplistic, or peddlers of catchy beats and nothing more. Hercules and Love Affair harkens back to a bygone era in many ways, with the busy, layered production serving as a vessel for some pretty delicious nuggets of dance-pop; it’s not just hypnotic and impeccably produced (though it’s both of those things), it’s also exciting and free-wheeling and dramatic, conjuring images of Madonna-as-floor-filler, or ABBA, or “Don’t Leave Me This Way”, any number of cultural touchstones who married perfectly composed pop songs to insidious dancefloor rhythms.

“Blind” is the obvious standout here — there’s a solid chance you’ve actually heard it, for one, and with good reason, as it’s a beautifully tense catch-and-release number that boasts Hegarty’s best vocal on the record and a gripping sense of dynamics. It’s more danceable than album opener “Time Will”, which layers Antony’s vocals over one another to form a dense, hypnotic, emotional round over skeletal synths, and remains an arresting introduction to the record despite functioning more like a torch song than a disco barn-burner. Deeper in the record, Butler and friends unspool fun tracks like “True False/Fake Real”, which begins a cappella somehow before hitting its stride with a series of riveting bonkers string samples, the bassy, sex-dripping “Easy”, and the insistent “You Belong”, which confidently conjures ’90s house with sprightly synth chords and rubbery fake bass.

The whole while, Hercules and Love Affair sounds like a pinwheeling rip through dance music’s greatest hits; it’s full of groove, surprising left turns, and melodic smarts, and sounds just as good as the disco of yesteryear that birthed it.

Playlist track: “Blind”

157. TV on the Radio, Return To Cookie Mountain (2006)

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I’ve been consistently amazed, through this process, at the way time (and a little distance) shapes your perception of an album, the way great records find a way to remain relevant to the listener at different stages of life. In the digital age, albums eventually get whittled down for a lot of listeners, myself included — the fat gets trimmed away, the tracklist gets whittled down into playlist fodder, and it becomes eminently easier to simply check out the highlights. TV on the Radio hit peak accessibility with their follow-up to this record, Dear Science, but the Brooklyn art-rockers had already been on the business end of reams and reams of gushing music-crit ink for their Return to Cookie Mountain. It’s a record that I liked just fine when it came out, but that’s been (incorrectly, it turns out) sanded down into a highlight-reel in the wake of total Spotify dominance.

So why include it on my list if I didn’t realize how fantastically listenable it is ten years after its release? The answer’s simple, friends: as you know from what you’ve seen on this countdown so far, I value the atmospheric record just as much as the exciting record, if it’s able to set the mood in a transportive, absorbing way. The problem isn’t where I ranked Return to Cookie Mountain on this list; it’s that I ranked it for the wrong reasons, incorrectly categorizing it as a “moody, atmospheric” album and not an “exciting” one.

Which, of course, isn’t to say that Return to Cookie Mountain isn’t moody or atmospheric. On the contrary: the mood-conjuring at play here is rather astonishing. TV on the Radio are architects of tracks, building elements brick by brick within a song until even the vocals – courtesy of the finest singing tandem in indie-rock, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone – are chasing each other around the fringes of the cut. Big, cavernous drums and a plucked acoustic line seem to form the basis of opener “I Was A Lover”, until guitar-and-effects wizard Dave Sitek drops a big, bleating sample right into the middle of the rhythm. It sounds like everything, and also nothing; it’s melodic, yet chaotic, boozy, yet sobering. It sounds like a half-tuned orchestra trying to figure out how, if we were forced to express all of our emotions from now on without words, they would convey “regret”.

“Hours” sounds a little more traditional in the grand scheme of things, with deceptively tricky The National drums and plinking piano keys forming the foundation for some of Kyp Malone’s finest falsetto work. (Those keening “oooohs” in the intro are intoxicating, and maybe worth the price of entry by themselves.) “Province” sounds like a mid-tempo TV on the Radio song like any other, with Adebimpe’s strong baritenor and Malone’s sonorous falsetto intertwining mid-chorus, but it’s one that has the good sense to introduce David Bowie into the choir. The skeletal march of “A Method” is beguiling, all drums and an unbelievable melody; the percussive “Let the Devil In” sounds like garage rockers crashing a drum circle, complete with euphoric “whoa-oh-oh”s in the coda; “Dirtywhirl” feels so invitingly scuzzy, a rocker drunkenly staggering down a carnival midway, a track of such transfixing songcraft that it just caused me to space out thinking about it.  And that’s to say nothing of “Wolf Like Me”, a savage, gritty lycanthrope barnburner that has earned its way onto every post-2006 Halloween party mix ever.

These are but several of the brilliant moments Return to Cookie Mountain commits to wax, and there are plenty more where they came from; TV on the Radio’s strength here is being hypnotic and exciting all at once without losing their place, fostering a mood just as urgently as it delivers peak after thrilling peak. Or, to put it more simply, it’s just really good music and you should listen to it.

Playlist track: “Dirtywhirl”

158. Common, Electric Circus (2002)

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It should speak to Common’s prolific nature in the 2000s that Electric Circus isn’t even his best album of the decade, which I suppose should be a spoiler alert but if you’re making a list of this nature and show no love to Like Water For Chocolate your credentials are almost definitely suspect. Circus is much less of a given than Like Water — it’s almost defiantly divisive, in fact, finding Common’s rootsy, sensitive-street-poet hip-hop stirring the pot with an album so experimental and dense that many fans retreated. The ones who stayed, who could find Common’s hippie rhymes (hippie-hop?) and the J. Dilla/Soulquarians compositions palatable and exciting, were rewarded with as forward-thinking a hip-hop record as we heard in the aughties.

But then, Common was keeping heady company those days. The Soulquarians, an unofficial collective of hip-hop and r&b’s weirdos, bohemians, and music dorks, were firing out quality work collectively and as a unit at a pretty astonishing pace; Questlove, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Roy Hargrove, Pino Palladino, J. Dilla, Raphael Saadiq, and Q-Tip were all members, and if you’re familiar with turn-of-the-century hip-hop and neo-soul, you’ll light up at the mere mention of any of these trailblazers. Responsible for Voodoo, Mama’s Gun, First Born Second, Things Fall Apart, and the aforementioned Like Water For Chocolate, the Soulquarians’ final two officially credited records were both released within a span of a month: The Roots’ Phrenology and this album here.

It’s worth noting the proximity of the two recordings. Both represented a drastic departure from the previous ouvre of the credited artists; where The Roots went dark and gritty, drawing from punk’s restless and twitchy energy, rock’s experimentation, and the deep urban decay of the blues, Common and the Soulquarians took the emcee’s genteel, free-love rhymes into space, weaving an intricate tapestry of extraterrestrial funk, acid and garage rock, and drippy psychedelia under Common’s patented plainspoken free-thinker rhymes. It’s the kind of record you vibe out to on a long, overnight drive, or play while you’re gazing contemplatively at a lava lamp, and it proved very divisive for Common’s fanbase.

Of course, as the man himself says on the chunky, harmonica-laced “I Got A Right Ta”, “hip-hop’s changin’ — and y’all want me to say the same?”, which is a valid frustration for an emcee consistently noted for churning out different versions of the same record. (Look at his 2000’s output alone: Like Water For Chocolate, Be, and Finding Forever all follow the same sonic template, to varying degrees of success.) In that sense, Electric Circus almost feels like a purging — a natural progression from Like Water For Chocolate, heretofore Common’s most artistically ambitious record, but a necessarily outlet for the rapper to unleash his every flight of fancy in one spot. From bringing Sunny from P.O.D. on to spit aggressively over a bed of churning electric guitars to paying tribute to Jimi Hendrix with Erykah Badu on the monolithic, pounding 8-minute rocker “Jimi Is A Rock Star”, to introducing horn-flecked, bop-jazz swing into the Jill Scott-featuring “I Am Music”, each track introduces a new wrinkle into the record’s vast, cavernous sonic palette. Soaring wah-wah guitars, woozy horns, and the grace notes of a choir made up of r&b’s in-crowd including Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Cee-Lo and Bilal forms the musical bedrock of the 10-minute-long “Heaven Somewhere”, the album’s best and most expansive track; it’s a master-course in negative space, in harmony, in the slow burn, and it’s intoxicating.

But, then, intoxicating might be the way to describe Electric Circus as a whole: these space-age slow jams are thrills for music nerds, reeling track after beautiful track of restless experimentation, of forward-thinking and history-indebted musical fireworks, and, occasionally, transcendence.

Playlist track: “Between Me, You, & Liberation”

159. Lady Gaga, The Fame Monster (2009)

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I suppose this is the part where I’m supposed to write a lengthy intro detailing my credentials, perhaps talk about how many cool bands that cool people like I also like, or talk about how, normally, I wouldn’t make such a huge concession to modern pop before addressing this particular Lady Gaga record and discuss how even I, with my highbrow tastes and fabulous music-choosing pedigree, have to give her begrudging props for her highly addictive pop hooks. I’m supposed to do that, sure, because any review that touts the merits of modern top 40 dance-pop has to approach it from a very over-analytical and self-reflexive place; I guess there’s always the ironic-appreciation route, too, or perhaps the one where I tout Lady Gaga as the obvious torch-holder for innovators like Bowie and Madonna.

But, you know what? I’m thirty. I spent my early twenties being derisive towards pop music, ignoring all its myriad charms in favor of curling up with a bunch of indie bands I didn’t really like that much because, I thought, it made me cooler. It took me a couple of years to realize that guilty pleasures don’t truly exist — that one should not be ashamed of liking what one likes (provided what one likes isn’t Nickelback, naturally), because you’re only depriving yourself of joy that way. Three short years after Lady Gaga released The Fame Monster, Carly Rae Jepsen gave the human race a perfect and beautiful gift in the form of her song “Call Me Maybe”; liking albums like this unapologetically allowed me to appreciate songs like Ms. Jepsen’s treasure of a pop tune without shame or reproach. So why make my review of The Fame Monster an apology, when it should be a celebration? Dollars to donuts any music snobs reading this would cite Adele as their one concession to pop music, because you can’t dance to Adele’s music and that somehow makes it cooler.

Initially conceived as a companion EP to Gaga’s first album, The Fame, The Fame Monster became its own entity after Gaga realized what a progression it was from that first record; where The Fame was a hook-heavy, danceable collection that simultaneously satirized and embraced pop artifice, Fame Monster is more Gothic, infinitely more well-written, and better-performed. Gaga cited horror movies and industrial music as influences here, and it’s easy to see that in the brassy, flippantly macabre “Teeth” or in the Psycho stabbing strings of the “Bad Romance” intro; still, what’s most important is Gaga’s pure ability at writing off-kilter, insidiously catchy songs, and The Fame Monster at a scant eight-song length reels them off at a breakneck pace.

She conjures ’90s Madonna with the beguiling, “Careless Whisper”-meets-“Vogue”-esque “Dance in the Dark”, and evokes the perfect pop of ABBA’s best moments with the dramatic, Europop-flecked “Alejandro”. (It almost sounds as if Ace of Base actually wrote an ABBA-quality pop song.) She concedes to the call of the power ballad with “Speechless”, one of her most honest, gratifying compositions to date, foreshadowing future mega-hit “You & I”; she even trades vocals with Beyonce on the bonkers “Telephone”, which builds a beautiful tension with that spellbinding piano intro.

Any of these songs would strengthen a lesser pop album immeasurably, but we haven’t even discussed Gaga’s magnum opus, a song so good I’m not sure I express the vocabulary to describe: “Bad Romance”. Scoff away, kids, but “Bad Romance” is SO GOOD. That lurching, insistent beat, the psychosexual themes, the Hitchcock references, that absurd and feral-sounding “rah-rah-AH-AH-AH” opening, the way the ominous, tense spoken-word pre-chorus launches into the soaring major key for the hook, the way hooks layer in on each other and then double back again… “Bad Romance” might be the single best hit song of this era of pop music. What other major hit is as wonderfully demented as this? Or arranged as impeccably? What other chartbuster has so many marvelous little moving parts, each one catchier than the last?

And that, my friends… that is why Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster is so good. Instead of pushing against the mainstream and being willfully obtuse, on this record, Gaga found a way to harness her pop smarts and her artier flights of fancy into something of impeccable quality and endless replay value. She’d go on to have more success, as we all know, but this album represents the peak of her abilities as a songwriter. I thought, when I realized that I liked this Gaga character, that the sheen might wear off in a few years; turns out, I thought wrong, and The Fame Monster sounds better than ever.

Playlist track: “Bad Romance”

160. J. Dilla, Donuts (2006)

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I’ve touched upon this elsewhere, but there’s a certain degree to which it’s difficult to separate the music from the story. Take Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, for example — it’s impossible to listen to it with fresh ears, as the average music fan can never un-hear how, internally, the band was being ravaged by acrimonious breakups between members, and it’s impossible to hear “Go Your Own Way” or “The Chain” without that frame of reference. Oh, sure — Rumours is an all-time great album precisely because the turmoil inspired brilliant songwriting and passionate performances, but still, there’s an added oomph to every note of that album specifically because of its painful circumstance. Warren Zevon was literally dying as he recorded The Wind, and it’s impossible to hear it without seeing the specter of death looming close by; Tom Waits’ Bone Machine is far more death-obsessed than The Wind, but it’s never considered in the same reverent, emotional terms because Waits is still kicking around two decades later. It’s the nature of the beast, the way we music folk internalize the lore of our heroes and allow it to inform what we let in.

And so we have J. Dilla’s Donuts, an immaculately crafted whirlwind of instrumental hip-hop recorded, quite literally, from the producer’s deathbed; he never made it to the album’s release. It’s difficult to articulate just how essential Dilla has been in hip-hop’s evolution; perhaps it’s better to let the man’s roots speak for themselves, and make a list of notables he’s crafted tracks or albums for. That list would include Common, The Pharcyde, The Roots, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, Slum Village, A Tribe Called Quest, both Phife Dawg and Q-Tip, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Big Pooh, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Royce Da 5’9″, and none other than Tupac himself; few producers have made their mark quite as well as Jay Dee.

And so, when I listen to Donuts, I find that there’s little there that would distinguish it from any other collection of J. Dilla beats — which really speaks to the quality of his art than anything else — except for the pure knowledge that this record was assembled with the knowledge that it would be the last ideas he’d ever put to wax. Which makes it sound like it should be a morose, haunted affair on paper, when almost exactly the opposite is true: Donuts is lively, by turns warm and gritty, and an almost relentlessly upbeat trip through Dilla’s always-racing mind. Does that inherently give Donuts the qualitative leg up over other similar releases? Yes and no — of course death doesn’t automatically make something retroactively better, but peeking into the consciousness of someone on their way out is certainly fascinating.

And a fascinating musical soundscape Donuts certainly is. Dilla digs deep in the crates for this one — a staggering 33 tracks spread across 44 minutes deep — and pulls out a beautifully breakneck, seamlessly woven, sonically ambitious masterwork. Each little nugget showcases a different facet of Dilla’s producing technique, be it his way with snappy drum claps or his oh-so-good deployment of sped-up soul vocals. It feels like a final airing of ideas; while the deliciously groovy “Workinonit” approaches an epic three minutes, most other tracks come and go within the span of 90 seconds, which makes Donuts the instrumental hip-hop equivalent of a Guided By Voices record, where songs are pared down to their basic essence and best parts with no padding or filler before moving on.

Ultimately, what makes Donuts such a staggering statement is not that it dwells on Dilla’s impending departure; it addresses it, sure, in the form of tracks like the lovely, reverent “Bye”, the swelling soul of “Don’t Cry”, or the warm farewell of “Last Donut of the Night”, but it doesn’t dwell. Nope, Donuts is wonderful because it genuinely feels like Dilla decided to throw together a little goodbye party; his music suggests peace, love, unity, all the beautiful utopian ideals that he wishes for his world in his absence. At the end of the day, even the title speaks to it; there’s no highbrow reason that J. Dilla called his final record Donuts, he just did it because he really loved donuts and it’s that simple. Did he intend the overly-analytical to read that as an implicit paean to treating yourself to life’s little pleasures while you can, to finding your donut and allowing yourself to enjoy it with abandon, to simply boiling things down to spreading love and taking it from there? Probably not. But his story, and his legacy, shaped this album, and it sounds all the better for it.

Did I talk about music in this review? Not much. But Donuts isn’t really an album you can write about and accurately convey how vivid and comforting it is from a sonic perspective; it’s a meditative, lively, funky, hooky, and ultimately beautiful whirlwind of a record, and you just have to hear it for yourself.

Playlist track: “Workinonit”

161. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest (2009)

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Tough to write about, but easy to listen to: Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest is, perhaps, the most ornate, perfectly composed, fully realized album on this list, and quantifying why it’s so good without devolving into rote amateur music theory might be the biggest challenge I’ve faced yet.

I don’t want to conjure an image of the tortured writer, face bedraggled and flecked with five o’clock shadow, nursing a glass of whiskey as he struggles to find the right combination of words. In fact, as I write this, I’m comfortable in an old Patriots hoodie and  slippers, and my hair looks fairly neat today. I don’t hold such a deep emotional connection to Grizzly Bear and this record that I can’t have a word out of place, lest I do disservice to a band that has inspired great passion in me. No, Grizzly Bear doesn’t make my soul raw with the feels, nor am I particularly married to any of their other (very good, but still) records; I just like Veckatimest a great deal, and I’d love to be able to describe it to you.

It’s not even a particularly weird album, either. I mean, it’s weird in the pantheon of pop music at large, in the sense that it’s an intricate record without a lot of big hooks (“Two Weeks” notwithstanding, which you’ve likely heard in a commercial or an episode of How I Met Your Mother), but under the umbrella of indie-rock, Grizzly Bear sounds like Ed Sheeran compared to, say, Animal Collective. I suppose it’s somewhat folksy, but not in the big, U2-with-banjos way of Mumford & Sons; I’m reminded more of Neil Young gone electric, or My Morning Jacket’s big, reverb-ed, canyon-like wall of sound. But then there’s craftsmanship in the vein of the great pop composers: of Phil Spector, of Brian Wilson, of classic Brill Building sound construction. Indeed, the layering of vocal harmonies and the use of angelic choirs to augment the instrumentation calls to mind Wilson’s most transcendently beautiful moments, or even some of the more imaginative flights of fancy found tucked away in Queen records.

It’s beautiful, is what I’m saying. I don’t want to take away from the songwriting when I say it doesn’t directly attack my emotions like so many nakedly confessional indie-rockers do; it’s just that music, pure, beautiful music, is at the core of what makes Veckatimest tick so confidently. It’s an evocative record, with moments so rapturous that it causes an involuntary physical reaction akin to hearing great moments in classical pieces. It’s the Handel, the Mozart, the Tchaikovsky of its day.

Hyperbolic? Who’s to say? Who’s to say that the apocalyptic acoustic guitar flecks in the driving, haunting opener “Southern Point”, or the majestic choral intro to “Dory”, or the rising and falling countermelodies in “Two Weeks” aren’t perfectly composed enough to keep company with the originators? Witness closing track “Foreground”, which functions as a relatively no-frills piano ballad (albeit one with a lurching, fractured melody so potent you don’t really notice) until a lengthy choral build flits through the album’s final minute, culminating in a harmonic flourish so crystalline, so fragile-sounding, and yet so ambitious and musically complex that it’s almost the only way this album could end.

And Veckatimest is filled with moments like that. Grizzly Bear are a normal band. They have guitars and drums and bass and sometimes piano, and they can write songs that fit that format more traditionally; but a thousand bands sound like that. Hell, a million. Veckatimest sounds like everything ever and nothing all at once. Perhaps the reason I had a hard time starting this review is that it’s hard to convey its singular beauty without you hearing it first.

Playlist track: “Two Weeks”, by simple virtue of sounding great even when removed from the greater context.

 

162. Brother Ali, Shadows on the Sun (2003)

Posted on by andrewsratliff

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A blind, Muslim, albino rapper? I have to assume that Brother Ali would be a viral sensation if he emerged in today’s world. In a world where minor celebrities arrive out of thin air due to a share-happy and click-happy society, it’s virtually guaranteed, because he has a hook. The clickbait alone would be epic: “This Blind, Albino Muslim Steps Out Onto A Stage. What He Does Next Is Incredible!”

Fortunately, the fact that Brother Ali has a hook isn’t the focal point of his music. It informs it, sure — on Shadows on the Sun‘s best track, Ali addresses self-confidence in the face of, err, non-traditional physical attributes, and his whole career emerged in the wake of his battle-rap credentials, which were no doubt honed by the bullying he’s been transparent about experiencing as a youth — but he’s a nimble, time-honored, gimmick-free emcee, and Shadows on the Sun is exhibit A.

Existing on Rhymesayers Entertainment — home of relatively wholesome, old-school-oriented backpackers — and boasting production by Ant of Atmosphere fame, Shadows on the Sun could have been the sort of white-rapper album that we saw many times over in the 2000s: the minimalist, esoteric, highbrow rap personified by the likes of Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox. Which isn’t to take anything away from Def Jux or Anticon or any of the folks pushing abstract, different hip-hop in the 2000’s, but that’s simply not who Brother Ali outs himself as on this record. Rather, he’s positive yet hard-edged, with an easy, gruff, storytelling flow that sounds more indebted to Nas than any indie-kid’s concession to hip-hop. In other words, he may live with a pale face, but he hardly raps with one.

As with so many of the rap albums we’ve discussed in these pages thus far, Shadows on the Sun lives and dies by the force of its instrumentals; here, Ant, freed from the constrictions of creating beats for Atmosphere’s introspective and emotional frontman Slug, is able to weave a lengthy tapestry of hard-hitting boom-bap. The title track alone is a testament to how well Ant presents himself here: a nimble, intricate bassline forms the basis of the track, while cracking drums, spare piano, and chipmunk-soul sped-up vocals fill in the blanks. Ali, Ant, and the aforementioned Slug all acquit themselves nicely on “Blah Blah Blah”, which essentially sets up an Ali/Slug rap battle over squelching synths and DJ scratches. “Bitchslap!” delivers precisely what its title suggests with hard-hitting “We Will Rock You” drums and a bluesy chord progression, as well as the line “I’m a cross between John Gotti and Mahatma Gandhi, look between pimp and square you’ll probably find me there”, which seems to sum up Ali’s positivity-minded but street-sharpened manifesto quite well.

And then there’s “Forest Whitiker”, with that sunny beat and that addictive little organ trill, and a confident, optimistic Brother Ali waxing lovably about the value of confidence and self-worth dancing nimbly above it all. That opening verse says it all, Ali running down a list of his physical shortcomings before deciding “you might think I’m depressed as can be, but when I look in the mirror I see sexy-ass me”. Which, sure, it makes “Forest Whitiker” sound like Christina Aguilera singing the drippy inner-beauty ballad “Beautiful” even after being doctored up by a personal trainer and a make-up team, in theory; but Ali’s rhymes ring true, particularly to, perhaps, a writer who needed to be taught to find the beauty in his appearance instead of dwelling on some crooked teeth and a few extra pounds. Perhaps that writer walks around with a little extra confidence because of people like Brother Ali telling him on wax that he needed to own his image in order for others to buy into it.

So, yeah, “Forest Whitiker” is such a joyous, infectious, important song that it would probably elevate a lesser record with the sheer pull of its energy; fortunately, Shadows on the Sun is an immaculately-crafted, filler-free rap record, and can stand on its own merits either way.

Playlist track: “Forest Whitiker”

163. The Darkness, Permission To Land (2003)

Posted on by andrewsratliff

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Ladies and gentlemen, somewhere along the line, we did something terrible to rock and roll: we, as a society, allowed rock music to become boring.

I’m not talking about indie-rock, or garage-rock, or any other form of hyphenate-rock, I’m talking about big-haired guitar rock. We once had Van Halen, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden, Slade, Black Sabbath, any number of bands who had the killer hooks to back up their pomp and their guitar histrionics, singable and relatable bands you’d crank in the car. But all good things must come to an end, and when Nirvana blew the doors open for alternative music in the ’90s, rock splintered, and was never the same.

The underground continued to make smart, challenging music; even the music of the early-’90s Seattle explosion was cool, with bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden tweaking stadium rock without losing what made it work. But watershed movements often lead to oversaturation and, eventually, a severe watering down of the talent pool, and, just like how Garth Brooks was rad but if you connect the dots he’s tangentially at fault for the insufferable bro-country of Luke Bryan and his ilk, big rock bands begat more big rock bands, and the further they went down the line, the more they sucked.

Woe to the band that makes me long for the halcyon days of Bush and STP (two godawful bands that now seem like the lesser of two evils), but the market became saturated in the 2000s. When The Strokes and The White Stripes happened, we got a brief respite in the form of the much-heralded, oft-forgotten “garage rock revival” (anyone remember The Vines?), but the majority of big guitar rock was spearheaded by the likes of Nickelback and Creed, and then along came Seether, Theory of a Deadman, Breaking Benjamin, Puddle of Mudd, Three Doors Down, Shinedown, Evanescence, Staind, pick your garbage minor-key angst-rock band it doesn’t matter. (Even Buckcherry, who briefly appeared to be interested in GNR-esque revival-rock, morphed with warp-speed into a band with angsty sonics and leering date rapist lyrical content.)

Ah, but somewhere in that vast wasteland of post-grunge, there was a band that was prepared to save us from the glut of detuned guitars and clenched-anus vocals. The Darkness elicits a lot of reaction these days, perhaps because millennials secretly embrace camp and the immortal “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” is a high-camp classic, boasting a riff so perfect it’s irritating and a roaring falsetto in the chorus and at least fifty other perfect little touches that lovingly evoke ’80s hard rock; back in 2003, when “I Believe” launched The Darkness square into Middle America, the big debate on all of our lips was whether or not the band was in on the joke. Just like Andrew W.K., it doesn’t matter and it never mattered.

Because, while The Darkness could certainly be accused of dipping a toe into the waters of parody, the fact of the matter is that they are a faithful recreation of the high-octane riffing and cocksure posturing of rock’s yesteryear. What use is labeling them a novelty act or a facsimile when they do it as good as anyone else?

Permission To Land was The Darkness’s debut and, true to the preening falsetto, earworm chorus, and tasty licks of “I Believe In A Thing Called Love”, oozes with melody and charm. Opener “Black Shuck” sets the tone right away, aping chunky AC/DC riffs with heavy, groovy precision; scant moments later, we get the glibly profane “Get Your Hands Off My Woman”, layered with flurried barre chords, delightfully urgent drumming, and siren-high falsetto fireworks; after that, we’re treated to “Growing On Me”, which sounds like a young Def Leppard in the lobby of an STD clinic, and which might be the catchiest song here. “Givin’ Up” sounds a little rootsier — I think, perhaps, a more English and less sucky Bad Company — but never ditches frontman Justin Hawkins’ shameless shrieking, while “Love Is Only A Feeling” plays it straight for a catchy, fun power ballad.

It’s pretty much uniformly gold, is what I’m saying; by recreating the streamlined, strangely soulful, fat-free arena-rock records of the ’70s and ’80s, The Darkness have created a filler-free pop-rock record that rewards repeat listens simply by being so damned entertaining. By the time “Friday Night” rolls around, sounding like a Grease outtake by way of Thin Lizzy, it’s too late and you’re won over. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a gimmick or not; The Darkness are a real band with a real record, and their pop songs are really good.

Playlist track: “Growing On Me”